AustLit

'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)