The Last Speakers

by K. David Harrison

  Our next stop was the western seaside enclave of Wadeye, which enjoyed a particularly bad reputation in the Australian press as a site of Aboriginal violence and unrest. Our guide, assigned to us by Tourism Australia, told us we would be living under heavy security and not allowed out after nightfall. On landing at the dusty airstrip, we saw a gaggle of smiling children and a stern hand-painted sign saying, “Don’t bring ganja into our community.” We found the people of Wadeye to be gracious and hospitable.

  Accompanied by elders, including three ladies over 70 years of age,7 we set off to visit several sacred sites. Walking along through the light underbrush and rustle of dead leaves, the ladies kept up a constant dialogue. They suddenly stopped at a spot that to our untrained eyes looked hardly any different, yet for them was a clearly marked sacred site. An oval of slightly raised ground, it had two rock “nests” containing “eggs” of a mythical duck. Sitting down on the leaves, they told the Dreaming story attached to that very place. It involved a deity that metamorphosized—first as a human, then as a duck—stopping along its journey to rest and deposit eggs at this site.

  As the ladies sang, the children foraged, finding tasty termites in rotten logs nearby, procuring fat grubs, and finding the greatest outback delicacy, a twig oozing wild honey, called “sugarbag.” They shared these with us, and we shared our much less exotic fare of sandwiches and boxed apple juice.

  After lunch, we were guided by local Cyril Ninnal up onto a bright orange rock escarpment, covered with impressive rock art. He sat down beneath the most spectacular one, a rendering of a headless man, and began to tell us the story in the Murrinh-Patha language, which is spoken locally but not endangered. Trouble was, Cyril was bound by taboo not to mention the name of the main character in the story, because that name also belonged to a deceased relative. Cyril’s sister Tess was present, however, and not bound by the same taboo, so he decided that every time he came to a place in the story where the hero’s name appeared, he would pause and Tess would call out the name. But here we encountered one more taboo. Cyril and his sister, as adult opposite-sex siblings, were forbidden from speaking to each other at all, and Tess could not even look in his direction. So, the request was relayed to Tess via an unrelated person, and then she stood off to the side, not looking at Cyril, but calling out the taboo name each time he paused in his story.

  One severely endangered language that we encountered near Wadeye was Magati Ke (or Marti Ke). Magati Ke is now reported by the community to be down to three elderly speakers. Accompanied by local linguists Maree Klesch and Mark Crocombe of the Wadeye Endangered Language project team, who have been working with this community for years with great results, we met with and spoke to three Magati Ke speakers, including “Old” Patrick Nunudjul.

  Yolngu musicians near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

  Patrick (born 1930) and his wife, Mona (born 1942), live outside Wadeye village, on ancestral lands overlooking a sandy beach. Vast spaces surround their house, along with wide-open seaside vistas. Yet when we arrived, they were sitting huddled together, an entire extended family of nine, sitting so close as to be touching, as if for warmth, except that it was over 80 degrees outside. Mona sent the kids off, and soon they returned with turtle eggs for us to sample (gooey and runny, they slide down the throat). Patrick and Mona sat down near a burbling stream, and Patrick taught us some words of the nearly extinct Magati Ke tongue: hoong-ge-ret, “head” ning-e-ning, “tongue” and der, “teeth.” Then he told us the “Teeth Dreaming” story, which the Wadeye project team told us they had not previously recorded. Listening along, and showing at least a partial understanding of the language, was Patrick’s nephew Aloysius Kungul (born 1956) sitting with his own son Isaac Kungul (born 1992). Isaac watched intently, and though he did not repeat Patrick’s Magati Ke words aloud, I watched him mouthing them silently, thus showing that he had taken it upon himself to learn fragments of the language. With the recordings we made and sent back to the community, perhaps Isaac, or someone of his generation, will be able to retell the Teeth Dreaming story long after the elders have made their exit back into the Dreamtime.

  As we visit the hotspots and take the pulse of languages, we find some more robust than expected, but others more feeble. Many languages we record have never before been recorded, and for some, it may be the last time they are captured on video. In order to preserve language diversity and to create healthy habitats for small languages, we need to understand how they are adapted to both their social and natural environments. More important, we need to know where and in what state of vitality they exist, what kinds of knowledge systems they contain, and what that knowledge reveals about the natural world. We will need the entire sum of human knowledge as it is encoded in all the world’s languages to truly understand and care for the planet we live on.

  A LAST SPEAKER?

  Sitting under a massive rock outcrop in a cave in Australia, we gazed up at the massive, fierce image of the Rainbow Serpent that adorned the rock. Aboriginal elder Charlie Mangulda, in the overpowering presence of the Rainbow Serpent, became positively solemn. “This is our ancient myth, how the Rainbow Serpent creates and destroys life,” Charlie began, as we perched on boulders in the red-rock cave. Considered to be a “last speaker” of Amurdag, Charlie is at the best of times a reticent man, He told us he had not used the language conversationally in some years and remembered words with difficulty.8

  Greg Anderson and I interviewed Charlie about his language and culture at this important dreaming site at Mount Borradaile, chosen carefully for its cultural significance to Charlie’s people. Charlie was not a talkative man, and most of our questions got monosyllabic answers: yeah or no. But once he got to talking, Charlie also shared stories of this place—learned from his father—of the Turkey Dreaming and of the Rainbow Serpent (described later in chapter 7).9

  We were very excited to be in the presence of a speaker of Amurdag. We pulled out a vocabulary list we had brought along and asked for words represented there. As Charlie shared with us names for animals in Amurdag, we were able to verify from the word list that we were indeed hearing the nearly extinct tongue. We dutifully recorded words like malayiwar, “wallaby” iraba, “father” and malawuruj, “dream.”10 Some of the longer or rarer words—such as ingirijingiri, “blue-faced honey eater,” or yal, “hot sand under ashes of fire”—Charlie was not able to remember or confirm for us, attesting to possible attrition of knowledge through lack of use. Amurdag, even in the tiny sample we were able to glimpse, shows some wonderful metaphorical expressions, the word for “west” is simply the phrase “sun go down.” And it can extend to accommodate modern life: jura reportedly refers to “paper,” “book,” and “office.”

  Charlie’s difficulty in recalling a language he had known from birth, but now almost never used, is what linguists call “attrition.”11 Can a person forget his own language entirely? Immigrants who seek to assimilate to another culture may go decades without speaking their mother tongue. Later, if they try to retrieve it, they may find their knowledge rusty or deficient. As the neural pathways decay from lack of use, they cannot even string together simple phrases in a language they once commanded natively. Many of the last speakers I’ve met, like Charlie, show both of these effects. They can barely remember common words, and the locally dominant language, whether English, Spanish, or Russian, has thoroughly infected their mother tongue, leading them to make all kinds of ungrammatical (from a traditional point of view) utterances.

  The image of Charlie speaking to us in the Rainbow Serpent cave, expertly photographed by National Geographic fellow Chris Rainier, was picked up and reproduced in press and Internet sites around the world a few months later, when we launched our language hotspots model. It brought unprecedented visibility to the plight of endangered languages, through the face of a single individual. But it also stirred up controversy and resentment among a few colleagues, who upon seeing the photograph and caption assumed that we had somehow clai
med to discover Amurdag’s last speaker, had rushed in with helicopters for a photo op, and had failed to acknowledge prior work. We were well aware of the decades-long efforts of linguists and speakers to document it and so many other rare Australian tongues, and in fact mentioned such efforts at every opportunity.

  Our visit with Charlie was not for the purpose of documenting Amurdag, which would have been the task of a lifetime. Rather, we wanted to hear Charlie’s own views on why his language is important and what it feels like to be the last reported speaker. We hoped to provide a global audience for Charlie’s viewpoint, believing that the fate of last speakers would be of intense interest to people if they only knew about it, if they could put a face and name to the problem. A primary goal of our hotspots model is to shine a light on the efforts of Charlie and others to hold back the tide of extinction. Judging by the amount of press, radio, and TV reports, we did just that, not only for speakers like Charlie, or for Australian Aboriginal tongues, but for the hotspots generally and many last speakers.12

  NEIL MACKENZIE GOES ON WALKABOUT

  We continued our Australian expedition in Broome, a beautiful coastal town in Western Australia. The beach resort hotels and surfers contrasted with the sights only a few miles inland. The landscape that was sacred to the local people remained almost unchanged. Here we visited the Rubibi people, a tiny remnant of a community that once roamed these lands freely. Their language, which they call Yawuru, is now reportedly down to three fluent speakers, with perhaps a dozen speakers of other levels of fluency. We sat on the back patio with the elders as they told us about the great changes they had lived through. Thelma Sadler, age 97, remembered when her people had first contact with the white settlers, and in a few years changed over from a hunting and foraging lifestyle to living and working on a cattle station. When they tried to leave to go back to their homeland, they were not allowed and were maltreated by the station boss.

  “I was born under a tamarind tree,” Thelma began, and then taught us a few words of her ancient tongue. “We say nyadi mingan for ‘Hello, how are you?’ and you can say galabu or galamabu ngangan for ‘I’m good.’” Laughing at our attempts to repeat the difficult words, she admonished that “language is best learned outdoors.” Thelma’s friend, Elsie Edgar, in her 70s, sat by her side reminiscing. “We used to build tree houses, called waragai, among the mangrove trees, and fish from them.” Elsie’s daughter Susan Edgar nodded approvingly. “Our grandmothers,” she said, looking at Elsie and Thelma, “are ceremony singers. They have specialized knowledge. People don’t realize how strong language is…. When we say the names of places, we can see those places in our mind.”

  To understand the Rubibi world, we needed to venture beyond the pleasant beachside town of Broome, where Elsie and Susan live in typical suburban homes, and to see the traditional places. And so we spent three days walking around the outback with our Rubibi guide Neil Mackenzie. Elders like Neil rely on an intimate knowledge of plants and landscapes to help sustain the language. Although he is an authority on cultural knowledge and survival, he does not consider himself a fluent speaker of the language.

  On a sandy plain overlooking the ocean, Neil stopped at a spot and began digging with his hands in the soft sand. Though the ground seemed completely dry underfoot, within two feet he struck water. “[This is] something we have been doing for thousands of years. People would never understand what the hell they’re doing, nobody trying to preserve it, look after it, continue it, keep going. Teaching kids and teaching people about how precious, what we have here, in this country, in our environment, and protecting waterholes. Nobody would know, they would not think there would be water here.”

  “This is all songline country, this is where all the young people travel at the songlining age, because you find a lot of water. Small watering holes, like living water. This is what we call, what we relate to in our Dreamtime, bogarigada. And a lot of these waterholes, they exist here, and you can find them. But as you get closer to the township, a lot of the holes are buried up and have buildings on them, because they wanted to keep people, Aboriginal people, out of the town. And they kept them out here. This is the reserve they created for the Aboriginals, from the 1905 Act. We were regulated under the Flora and Fauna Act. We were part of the animals, native animal species. We weren’t regarded as human, not even classified as citizens of Australia, until 1967. I was born an illegal alien in my own country. We didn’t have the privileges of, what do they say, normal people. We weren’t normal people, we were outcasts. Even today we are second-class citizens. We are still not recognized as or considered normal.”13

  Despite their outward appearance of complete acculturation (driving a pickup truck and talking on a cell phone), Australian Aboriginals like Neil have managed to hang onto at least some of their wealth of ancient knowledge. Knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants, he explained, was commonplace: “This is a vine. You can see it grow here, coming from the ground, so it’s using this as a host. It’s a parasitic vine. And it grows this little seed, or bead. Common name, they call it crab’s eye bead.”

  As he pointed out more and more plants to us, we began to understand how sophisticated Rubibi survival technology was. What appeared to our eyes as a rough and inhospitable landscape was to Neil and his people more like a grocery store, pharmacy, and living room all in one.

  “In the early days, when they were surviving in the bush, they moved around a lot, following food,” Neil explained. “Because when they went to one waterhole, the animals would move to another waterhole, so they had to follow the animals from waterhole to waterhole. And sometimes, there’s always droughts, and times are real lean, not a lot of food around. If they were carrying a baby, or a fetus, and they knew that they would not be able to get enough nourishment for themself or the baby, they would use this in a way where they would crush it up and make a concoction out of it. But only people who have an idea how to make this concoction of preventing the birth, we would abort the unborn fetus of the child. The mother would live on and be able to survive in drought. So this is like, um, an abortion pill. And today, the colonists came and they made rosary beads out of them, the missionaries. Little did they know, ’cause they’re Catholic, you know, they’re against abortion, they were wearing these around their necks, with rosary beads. The powder in them, there’s enough toxin in there, if it’s not prepared properly, but the powder in this is the toxicity level, can kill a frog or a dog, from that one bead, or seed here.”

  As Neil chuckled at the irony of rosaries made of abortion pills, he told us one reason why the knowledge needed to be kept secret: “They don’t use it anymore because a lot of the people that didn’t know how to make a drink out of this, or a concoction to abort the unborn fetus, actually killed the mother, too. So they no longer use it anymore, because it was too, um, dangerous a method of doing things like that. But before that, in nomadic life, they used to use this to abort the unborn fetus.”

  A hundred yards away, within view of the pebbly beach, Neil stopped and pulled up by the roots a six-foot canelike plant. “You know we never fished?” he said. “We speared a lot of fish, with spears, but we never used the fishing line. We’d go out in the rocky pools, and the fish traps had so much water in the bottom there.” He gestured to his knee to show the depth of water in a tidal pool, where fish would be trapped when the tide receded. “We’d take this plant out here, pull the bottom, get these roots and crush them up with a stone, and break it off, mash it up, mix it with the sand, walk in the pools…. A couple of minutes later, you see the fish come up, upside down.” We marveled at the power of a plant root that could kill fish, and I asked if it was harmful to humans. “It’s actually not a poison,” he continued. “It gives off a little bit of a milky sap and it coats the gills and stops the oxygen coming in from the water into the gills so they float upside down and to the surface.” He made a satisfied motion, as if scooping up fish. “Big fish, that big”—he spread his hands a foot apart—�
�and little ones. Yeah, you wouldn’t starve, ’cause the tide comes in every six hours!”

  Neil paused to pick and eat a snow pea–like pod he called “green bird.” “When this tree dies, we know there’s something at the bottom there that’s eating the roots, ’cause it’s killed the tree. And we look and see a burrow and you see a worm that’s in there. And this worm is like a witchetty grub and tastes very much like macadamia nuts. And you can eat it. We call that one bein. I think it’s a moth that lays eggs, a particular moth. That’s what damaged those roots, back there.”

  A bit farther on, Neil pointed out Dreamtime’s main waterhole. Standing over it, all we saw was sand in a shallow pit. Neil jumped down into the hole and began digging, and sure enough, within a foot he struck water. This waterhole is called Bugarigara, which means “the Making” or “Dreamtime.”

  “By making the waterhole, singing songs to the waterhole, our ancestral spiritual being caused that we came to exist in this country. We come from the ocean onto the land; some people come from waterholes, and the rivers. When they’d sing the song, to the waterhole, they’d use boomerangs, and they’d beat them together. The men are the dreamers, in this country. They’re the story keepers. But because the women are more influential now, they seem to keep a lot of it themselves and pass it on. The men are more likely to be susceptible to alcohol than the women. They keep all the stories of their uncles and their grandfathers alive, if nobody else wants to take it on.”