Cirrus@Austlit

'The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’. For Hegel, philosophy arrives late on the scene: the world comes to be apprehended only after the fact, in retrospect. Events and historical processes outrun our ability to think them. In many ways, so-called salvage linguistic and anthropological studies in the south-east of Australia have been similarly backward-looking and caught behind the game. Many have struggled, perhaps none more so than Luise Hercus, to document fragmenting and fading languages and traditions in the face of the massive social disruption and change. This paper is an attempt to think the present by asking what can be done with the results of such studies in the context of Indigenous projects of cultural rejuvenation. The key question is: how does something new emerge? I describe how a group of Wirangu people translate a mythical narrative back into their language by drawing on archival materials and using Luise’s salvage grammar of Wirangu as a key. A third, crucial, ingredient is the everyday lived experience of the translators.'  (Introduction)