Based on the evidence of surviving First Fleet journals and vocabularies, the Indigenous people of Port Jackson (now Sydney Harbour), the Pacific coast and the Parramatta River, whatever their clan, referred to themselves in whole or in part as Eora (yura).
This word clearly meant ‘people’ in some sense, but whether it was the name for the whole of the inhabitants of the Sydney district is uncertain.
The curious British officers might have asked, but not one of them recorded a collective name for these people or for the language. I am always careful therefore to state that the language of coastal Sydney was that spoken by the Aboriginal people who called each other by that name.
In his published vocabulary (1798) Judge Advocate David Collins listed ‘Eo-ora – The name common for the natives’ and, questioning Bennelong, Collins remarked in the Appendix of his Account of the English Colony in New South Wales: ‘I then asked him where the black men (or Eora) came from?’
The clever linguist William Dawes recorded ‘Eoora – – – Men, or people’ and coined his own version: ‘eoras’, noting ‘Yenmaou mullnaoul naabaou eéora’, which means, he wrote, ‘In plain English: I will go tomorrow morning to see the people (before spoken of).’ He quotes a young Aboriginal girl called Wåriwear: ‘Nabaouwi ngalia naba eora widadwara’ – – – ‘The eoras shall see us drink [sulphur].’
In two further entries Dawes credits his principal informant, a fifteen year old girl named Patyegarang, saying ‘He gave pork (and) bread to the eoras’ and ‘The eoras gave fish to him.’
In his journal Philip Gidley King gives ‘Eo-ra — Men, or People’, while ‘Eo-ra (or) E-o-rah’ is the translation for ‘People’ in the vocabulary kept by Governor Phillip and his aides. ‘Yo-ra. A number of people’ occurs in the vocabulary enlarged by Captain John Hunter (1793).
Daniel Southwell recorded ‘People — E-o-rah’. Similarly, about 1805 Musquito and Bulldog, the two Aboriginal convicts sent to Norfolk Island by Governor Philip Gidley King, told the Reverend Henry Fulton that ‘Yea-warrah’ meant ‘black men’.
In a letter to Dr. William Farr, physician at the Royal Naval Hospital, Plymouth in 1791, Captain of Marines James Campbell described the Indigenous people as ‘Ioras / Natives’.
The anonymous compiler of a list of ‘Aboriginal names and meanings’ in the journal Science of Man (Sydney, 1908) stated: ‘Ea-ora—Name of tribe inhabiting the Sydney District’.
In the 1930s, Eora was adopted by Dr Frederick David McCarthy, curator of anthropology at the Australian Museum, Sydney, who drew on wordlists published in the journal Science of Man. In New South Wales Aboriginal Place Names and Euphonious Words, with their Meanings (3rd edition 1943), McCarthy gave ‘EORA: Black fellows of Sydney District’.
Quoting McCarthy as his authority, Norman B. Tindale (1974) wrote in Aboriginal Tribes of Australia that ‘The name Eora is accepted for the tribal group around Port Jackson.’ Tindale adopted Eora to replace the ‘hordal term Kamaraigal used in my post 1940 work’.
Lieutenant William Dawes, c 1830s Artist unknown AG6048 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Lieutenant William Dawes, c 1830s Artist unknown AG6048 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, HobartLanguage notebooks of William Dawes, Sydney Cove, 1790-1791 PHOTO: Joy Lai, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Keith Vincent Smith
The inspired and inspiring language notebooks compiled by Marine Lieutenant William Dawes have returned to England a second time.
This precious cargo first sailed away with Dawes when he boarded HMS Gorgon,leaving Sydney Cove on 18 December 1791 and arriving at Portsmouth on 18 June 1792.
After a brief visit to Sydney for the Living Language exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney,the notebooks are back at the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Dawes himself never returned to Australia. ‘The Aboriginal people’, wrote Indigenous linguist Jakelin Troy, ‘lost one of their most valuable allies and the colony a fine scientist who had hoped to settle there and continue his research’.
The bright shining stars of the exhibition for me were the two small notebooks in a glass case, dating to 1790-1791. They left Sydney in 1792 and returned briefly in the Living Language exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales.
This major exhibition was built on years and months of research and consultation with many Aboriginal communities by the library’s Indigenous Engagement (IE) Branch. I was privileged to collaborate with both Ronald Briggs (Gamilaroi), Curator, Research & Discovery and Melissa Jackson (Bundjalung) in two exhibitions at the State Library: EORA in 2006 and MARI NAWI in 2010.
Damien Webb (Palawa), Manager, Indigenous Engagement and Marika Duczynski (Gamilaroi), IE Project Officer, were also involved in the exhibition, which was backed by the State Library of NSW Foundation.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (14 July 2019), Matt Bungard quoted Melissa Jackson:
Lieutenant Dawes was just really interested in not just the culture, but getting to know the people and their nuances. The notebooks are incredibly important to Aboriginal people because they retain the conversational context which is crucial for contemporary language revival work today.
When they first became widely known, after a lapse of 180 years, these handwritten records of the coastal Sydney Language by William Dawes caused great excitement.
In November 1790, one month after Woollarawarre Bennelong and the friendly Eorabegan to frequent the English convict settlement at Warang / Sydney Cove, Dawes, a young marine officer from Portsmouth, took a small notebook and began to write down Indigenous words andphrases given to him by his informants.
The first book, titled (in another hand) Grammatical forms of the language of N.S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney is catalogued as MS 4165 (a) in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
From internal evidence, Dawes began his second notebook, MS 4165 (b), Vocabulary of the Language of N.S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney in 1791. It is the only source for what is known about his relationship with his principal informant, an Aboriginal girl named Patyegarang (Grey Kangaroo).
Dawes’s notebooks were located by Australian librarian, later Mitchell Librarian, Phyllis Mander-Jones and included in her publication Manuscripts in the British Isles relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, ANU Press, Canberra in 1972.T\
AN EARWITNESS ACCOUNT
Spoken words and sounds jotted down in English handwriting from his informants preserve Dawes’s earwitness account of their unwritten language through encounters, conversations, dialogues and exchanges of knowledge that remain, in the words of historian Paul Carter in The Calling to Come (Museum of Sydney, 1996) ‘a source of revelation’.
The trio of the two Dawes notebooks and a third wordlist kept by Governor Arthur Phillip and his aides, which I call the ‘Governor’s Vocabulary’ (Book C 1791), were soon in the hands of William Marsden (1754-1836), an associate of the influential Joseph Banks. Much later, they passed to the SOAS from Kings College, London.
WHO GAVE THE WORDS?
Dawes often acknowledged his Indigenous informants – in his first book principally Warreweer (who provided names of Indigenous plants), then Bennelong (her brother) and his second wife Barangaroo. In ‘Book B’ Patyegarang, who knew Dawes for just three months, is mentioned more than fifty times, but also Colebee, his wife Daringa, a girl named Gonangoolie, and others.
Dawes’s little language notebooks help to inform much of the ‘back story’ about this group, which fleshes out and confirms details about their lives not found in First Fleet journals. How much would we know about the Gweagal man Wárungin, Wángubile (‘Botany Bay Colebee’) in the profile that follows without Dawes’s records?
You can see the Dawes Notebooks online at <williamdawes.org> See also ‘The Language of Port Jackson’ under the heading Language in this blog.
THE SYDNEY LANGUAGE
The three SOAS notebooks were the basis of an accessible dictionary of cross-cultural communication in early Sydney by historian and linguist Jakelin Troy, first published in Canberra in 1993-4 in The Sydney Language.
Her work was the genesis of the revival of the classic language spoken by the Indigenous people who inhabited coastal Sydney.
Professor Troy writes:
The earliest and best records of the Sydney Language document the coastal dialect which was spoken in the immediate vicinity of the first British settlement at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson.
There are wordlists with phonetic translations for body parts, kin terms, language, mythology and ceremony, food, cooking and fire, weapons and artefacts (many illustrated in line drawings by Shirley Troy), water, elements, mammals, reptiles, birds, marine and aquatic life, plants and fruits and insects and spiders.
She points out that this wordlist
… is by no means a complete list of all the words in the Sydney language. It only contains the vocabulary which I was able to recover from the published and unpublished notes of known eighteenth and nineteenth century writers who recorded information about the Sydney Language. … In spite of the limitations of the wordlist it is a window onto the world of the Aboriginal people of Sydney.
Indeed, these words, sentences and placenames reveal traces of the past, a cultural memory and insight into the way Indigenous people viewed their spiritual and physical life before (and during) European settlement. This includes words they invented to describe the foreign technology, for example na-muru for a compass, from naa ‘to see’ and muru ‘the way, or a path’.
In September 1994 Dr. James Kohen, later my supervisor at Macquarie University, Sydney, gave me photocopies of these manuscripts taken from microfilm. I still have them, slightly out of focus and held together by rusty paperclips. Dawes’s words opened up new research possibilities. They were the stimulus that would take me through BA, MA and PhD degrees in Indigenous Studies and Anthropology.
The next year I was fortunate to obtain a copy of the first edition of The Sydney Language, which was reissued in June 2019 by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra with the help of funds raised by the Australian band, The Preatures.
Welcome to 2019, declared by the United Nations General Assembly as The International Year of Indigenous Languages (IY2019).
This weblog is intended to be an accurate account of the culture, language, social life and and personalities of the Indigenous People who inhabited the coastal area of what is now the City of Sydney. In January 1788, an English convoy of eleven ships arrived in this place, which they called Port Jackson, to establish the convict colony of New South Wales.
It is estimated that there were originally some 250 or more separate Indigenous languages spoken throughout mainland Australia. Today only 20 or so are spoken fluently and many of these are endangered.
One language united the Aboriginal clans or extended family groups in the Sydney area, from the north shore of Botany Bay in the south to Pittwater in the north and west along the river to Parramatta. It was spoken by some 30 clans, including the Wangal, Wallamattagal, Gadigal, Burramattagal, Cameragal, Gweagal, Gabrogal, Bidjigal and others.
The officers of the First Fleet, who recorded many Indigenous words, never learned the name of this language. Marine Captain Watkin Tench called it ‘the dialect of the sea coast’ and said it was spoken at Rose Hill (Parramatta). David Collins, who acted as secretary to Governor Arthur Phillip, preferred ‘The Port Jackson Dialect’.
In modern times it was called ‘The Sydney Language’ by Dr. Jakelin Troy, whose work of the same title, published in 1994 and based on language notebooks compiled by Lieutenant William Dawes, began the revival which has brought this supposedly ‘sleeping language’ back to life.
Shane Phillips CEO Tribal Warrior Aboriginal Corporation Redfern, NSW
TRIBAL WARRIOR LINGO
Young Koori boys and girls in Sydney’s inner suburb of Redfern have been learning the Sydney Language since 2011, when ‘Lingo on the Block’ classes were introduced by Uncle Shane Phillips, CEO of the Tribal Warrior Aboriginal Corporation, as part of the Clean Slate Without Prejudice project aimed at developing cultural awareness and pride among young people.
Phase 1 of the course, supervised by Paul Wilson of Augustinian Volunteers Australia, with Kareel Phillips and friends from Tribal Warrior, began the restoration of the original Sydney Language.
Since 2014 Tribal Warrior mentors have been tutored in the language by Jeremy Steele, who completed a Master of Arts research degree at Macquarie University, Sydney, The Aboriginal language of Sydney, in 2005, freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/738
The mentors pass this knowledge on to the young people in the scheme, in lessons based on Jeremy Steele’s database of Indigenous languages, grammar and phonetic respelling of words from William Dawes and other First Fleet vocabularies. The young learners can now sing songs, play games and welcome friends and strangers in Sydney’s original language.
The ‘Lingo’ sessions, Jeremy Steele has written, have been complemented by my own illustrated talks and presentations, based on decades of research into Indigenous culture, clans, social life and archaeology, including biographical sketches of such heroic Eora figures as Bennelong and Barangaroo, Colebee, Pemulwuy, Patyegarang, the Garigal voyager Bungaree, and many others.
Paul Wilson, who taught for several years at Cherbourg Indigenous community in Queensland, remains the coordinator of the Friday meetings – and much more at Tribal Warrior, now at 27 Cope Street, Redfern, New South Wales.
[Select Language on the EORA • PEOPLE Home Page for further information]
In his journal Philip Gidley King gives ‘Eo-ra — Men, or People’, while ‘Eo-ra (or) E-o-rah’ is the translation for ‘People’ in the vocabulary kept by Governor Phillip and his aides. ‘Yo-ra. A number of people’ occurs in the vocabulary enlarged by Captain John Hunter (1793).
