Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'Academic fieldwork data collections are often unique and unrepeatable records of highly significant events collected at considerable expense of researcher time, effort and resources. While fieldworkers have been quick to take advantage of digital technologies to enable them to collect and organise their data, standards and workflows are only now beginning to emerge to assist researchers to submit their data for archiving and access. This collection of refereed papers from the conference of the same name held at the University of Sydney in December 2006 provides a record of recent research practice by fieldworkers in linguistics, botany and anthropology, and by archive and repository managers.' (Publication summary)

'Born in 1909 in Hannover, Germany, Carl Georg Christoph von Brandenstein began recording Australian languages in the 1960s in the Pilbara. Over the next 30 years he also recorded information about Ngadjumaya from the south-east of Western Australia and Noongar in the south-west. After high school (Gymnasium) in Gera and Weimar, Carl went to study at Berlin University (1928–34) where he trained as an orientalist and historian of religion. He then studied at Leipzig (1938–39), where his doctorate, granted in 1940, was a study of the iconography of Hittite gods (Brandenstein 1943). He worked at the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin from 1934 to 1938 and continued to publish in this area.' (Introduction)

'The Pilbara is not a part of Australia that gets much attention in the literature. Of the traditional languages of the region we know little, and of the songs we know less. There is Carl Georg von Brandenstein’s book of song poetry, Taruru (Brandenstein & Thomas 1974), which includes some Ngarla songs and other, more recent, recordings of song performances from the region to the west by Mike Burns and by the filmmakers Frank Rijevec and Noellene Harrison. Ngarla songs provides some 68 song texts in Ngarla, with English translations. Ngarla is the language of Port Hedland and east past the De Grey River for which little has been recorded beyond a dictionary (Brown et al. 1991).'  (Introduction)

'This is a concise guide and an excellent introduction to the complicated issues of language reconstruction. Finding out about languages that are no longer spoken, or those that are still spoken by only a few people, can be a long and difficult process.'

'Taking texts and wordlists from historical sources and making them useful in current language programs and literature presents a variety of challenges. While some early recording of Australian indigenous languages was quite good, much of it was done by people who were not expecting to find complicated grammars or a rich understanding of the natural environment. In some areas of research there may be material recorded by trained linguists available to help decipher the relationship between written forms and the sound they are meant to represent.' (Source: Publisher's website)