AustLit

'This collection honours the work of Luise Hercus. Luise Hercus has been a leading figure in the documentation of Australian Indigenous languages for more than 50 years. Her work ranges from salvage studies to detailed descriptions, all richly contextualised by documentation of songs, stories, land and biographies.' (Introduction)

'This paper provides details of Luise Hercus’ early life and academic career, and documents her research in the Lake Eyre Basin from 1965 to 2005. It is based largely on information provided by Luise during oral history interviews, and supplemented by documentary sources where possible.' (Introduction)

'Luise Hercus’ pioneering and prolific fieldwork and scholarship are wellknown in Australia (see Gara, this volume, Koch & Obata, this volume). This chapter describes her contribution to the author’s understanding of a range of values, principles and methods in conducting language documentation, during two fieldwork-based collaborations during the late 1990s.1 If the chapter reads like a compilation of Luise’s brilliant advice and insights, it is presumably a combination of, on the one hand, Luise’s wisdom and experience, and on the other hand my own ignorance and naivety (hopefully with the former being the greater factor). Looking back, it is clear that I was more than just a beneficiary of these collaborations with Luise; these journeys shaped me' (Introduction)

'These are memories of travelling with my mother on her fieldwork trips for more than 50 years. Memories are imperfect, so I apologize for any errors – I’m sure there are some.'  (Introduction)

'My husband, Colin Macdonald, and I were introduced to Luise Hercus in 1990 by our mutual friend Isabel McBryde, a gifted talent scout, who realised how much our interests might overlap: Luise was doing fascinating fieldwork in South Australia, and Colin and myself were a retired couple with a diesel four-wheel drive and a love of exploring the countryside. As a result, we accompanied Luise on twelve of her field trips between May 1991 and September 2000.'  (Introduction)

'I first met Luise Hercus when we were both invited to dinner at the home of Bob (R.M.W.) Dixon in the suburb of Campbell, Canberra, late in 1970. Bob had invited me to the Australian National University to give an account at a seminar in the Department of Linguistics of my field work on endangered languages in far north Queensland in January and June-August of that year. Luise sparkled, as usual, despite her lifelong commitment to self-effacement.'  (Introduction)

'I am pleased to offer this paper in tribute to Luise Hercus who has always been quick to adopt new approaches to working with older sources on Australia’s Indigenous languages (see also Nathan, this volume). In that spirit, I offer an example of using a novel method of working with a large set of material created by Daisy Bates (1859-1951) in the early 1900s. The masses of papers she produced over her lifetime have been an ongoing source of information for Aboriginal people and for researchers (e.g. White 1985; McGregor 2012; Bindon & Chadwick 1992). The collection at the National Library of Australia (NLA) takes up 51 boxes and 8.16m of shelf space and contains a range of material, but here I will focus on the vocabularies of Australian languages. Bates sent out a questionnaire in 1904 that was filled in by various people by hand, creating a set of manuscript pages. She then supervised the typing of these manuscripts. Over the past two years I have been working with the NLA to make digital images of some 23,000 pages of these vocabulary manuscripts, and to create digital text versions of the 4,368 typescripts, which can then be linked back to the page images of both the typescripts and handwritten questionnaire manuscripts.' (Introduction)

'Oral literature and music are important elements of Aboriginal Australian cultures for contextualising linguistic and historical research. Neither music nor oral literature naturally lends itself to publication as a textual document. Yet the primary outputs of academic research in disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, and history have generally been textual.' (Introduction)

'When Luise Hercus began travelling around Victoria in the 1960s in search of speakers of Aboriginal languages, she was following in the footsteps of a number of nineteenth-century investigators. Most of the early recordists were missionaries or administrators with some training for the ministry. They were men, as one might expect, but some women played a part, including, Isabella Dawson, Mary Green, Frances Sievwright and Christina Smith, herself a lay missionary. In this paper I look at the records of these amateur scholars in the south-east (the Murray and south of the Murray), highlighting the problems that arise in interpreting their notation, in understanding their glosses, and in extracting grammar from their sentences, and I assess the value of the records, particularly with respect to language reclamation.'  (Introduction)

'The Ngarigu language was traditionally spoken in the inland south-eastern part of New South Wales. The name was especially applied to the Monaro region, but varieties of the same language were spoken:

• in the Tumut region, where the people and their language were called Wolgal or Walgalu;

• the Canberra-Queanbeyan and upper Murrumbidgee region by people known in the nineteenth century as Nyamudy (Namwich, Yammoitmithang, etc.);

• the Omeo region of Victoria (Koch 2011a).

'Since Schmidt (1919) the language has been classified as belonging to the Yuin group, now a subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan language family, along with its northern neighbour Ngunawal-Gundungurra and the coastal languages Dharawal, Dharumba, Dhurga, Jiringayn, and Thawa (cf. Wafer and Lissarrague (2008: chapter 4), and for the coastal languages, Besold 2012).' (Introduction)

'This paper looks briefly first at how the ways that phonemes are arranged in charts has changed over the years so as to give more information to readers about the nature of the sound systems of languages (in general), and then to make the charts more relevant to the sound systems of Australian languages.'  (Introduction)

'This study describes combinations of lexical verbs found within a single clause in the Waanyi language, traditionally spoken on country watered by the upper Nicholson River stretching from the Northern Territory into Queensland.' (Introduction)

'Inspired by Luise Hercus’ groundbreaking work on the use of historical sources in salvaging Aboriginal languages, this paper explores early methods of anthropology in Australia and how nineteenth century texts might be used to reconstruct aspects of Aboriginal languages and culture. It examines the rich but little known kinship material gathered by Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt through the 1870s and 1880s and now held in a number of Australian libraries and museums.' (Introduction)

'This paper is an analysis of the common lexical semantics in ethnobiological classification in Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan), based on the intensive documentation in Bordulk et al. (2012), who cover 821 names for over 550 species, an unusually high number of named species for languages in Australia’s Top End (GW pers. com.). Dalabon shares many of the common formal and semantic features described for ethnoclassification in Australian languages. I present an overview and detailed exemplification of these phenomena in Dalabon, and highlight data which do not pattern according to common observations of ‘formal linguistic similarities indicate semiotic relationship’ in Australian languages.'  (Introduction)

'Documenting emotions in Australian languages is a complicated task, not only because of caveats inherent to the privacy of this domain, but also because of additional cultural obstacles specific to the Australian context. Indeed, among Aboriginal groups, emotions are often considered too mundane or sometimes too traumatic to be discussed with strangers (Ponsonnet 2014a). However, linguists who have successfully explored emotions in Australian languages have revealed a wealth of linguistic resources (Turpin 2002; Gaby 2008; Harkins 2001; Ponsonnet 2014b). Dalabon, for instance, a severely endangered Gunwinyguan language of south-western Arnhem Land, numbers more than 160 emotional lexemes, encapsulating fine emotional categories.'  (Introduction)

'From the first encounters with outsiders, Indigenous Australians developed words for expressing the new things, animals and concepts that came with the outsiders. This paper shows how the distribution of a single loanword ‘work’ and its variants across Australia sheds light on early contact between outsiders and Indigenous Australians, as well as between Indigenous Australians themselves. I propose that widespread multilingualism has led to diffusion both of forms and of strategies for integrating them morphologically into the grammars of individual languages. The geographical distribution of a surprising pronunciation of ‘work’ involving a flap or trill and possibly a final /m/ suggests diffusion areas of borrowing from neighbouring languages and chain borrowing, rather than separate independent borrowings from English. Diffusion through traditional Indigenous languages, rather than through a contact language, provides a partial explanation for the surprising absence of particular variants in the English-lexifier contact languages that developed in Australia.'  (Introduction)

'There are just three birds whose scientific (Linnæan) name draws on a word of an Australian language. The first and last described are Ninox boobook (Latham 1801) Southern Boobook owl, and Petroica (Muscicapa) boodang (Lesson 1837) Scarlet Robin. Although neither the type descriptions nor Fraser & Gray (2013: 151, 256) specify the source language, from earlier records we can be confident that both species’ names are from the Sydney Language (also known as Eora or Dharug, not spoken as a first language since the 19th century). Boobook, as can be seen from the common name, has survived in Australian English, presumably assisted by its onomatopœia; it was first recorded as Bōkbōk ‘An owl’ in the vocabulary noted by Lieutenant William Dawes in 1790-91, the early English colony at Sydney (Dawes & Anonymous 2009: Notebook b, 3). The word behind the species of P. boodang was first recorded in the caption ‘Crimson-breasted Warbler, native name Bood-dang’ (Port Jackson Painter [between 1788 and 1797]).  (Introduction)

'The coastal Northern Kimberley was home to several Aboriginal groups, as well as being the divide between two major culture areas: the (freshwater) Wanjina groups, and the salt water peoples particularly associated with the names Bardi and Jawi. In this paper I use evidence from place names, cultural ties, language names, mythology, and oral histories to discuss the locations and affiliations of several contested groups in the area. Of particular interest are the Mayala and Oowini groups. In doing this work I build on techniques exemplified and refined by Luise Hercus in her beautiful studies of Central Australian language, land, and culture.' (Introduction)

'Luise Hercus has made many contributions to the survival and continuity of Australian languages, not the least of which is her work on Aboriginal song traditions, in particular those of the south-eastern quadrant of the continent. Equally significant are the contributions she has made to the documentation of Aboriginal placenames in Australia. She is the co-editor of three volumes on the topic and author of numerous relevant publications. Thus it is fitting that the present tribute to this remarkable woman brings together two themes that mesh so closely with her own interests: the mythical origin of song in central and eastern New South Wales (NSW), and the placenames associated with this mythology.' (Introduction)