This year is the United Nations’ International Year of Indigenous Languages—a marker to raise awareness of Indigenous languages and their fragility. Language is an inherent part of culture, protocol, custom and identity for Indigenous peoples globally. But as a Dunghutti person strong in my identity and culture, I found that exposure to my language throughout my childhood was fragmented—a byproduct of the brutality of colonisation and its devastating effects on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia.   

The Dunghutti people hail from the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Australia; our country predominantly occupies the Macleay Valley and coastline around the town of Kempsey. Our country benefits from a temperate climate and beautiful natural landscapes that range from mountainous eucalypt forests to lush rainforests and unspoilt white sand beaches. Historically, as Aboriginal people, we were resourceful hunter-warriors who cared for and made the most of what our land and waterways had to offer. We spoke Dunghutti language, practised ceremony and traded with our neighbours, never taking more than was needed to sustain us. But this idyllic way of life for my people was destroyed through the act of violent colonisation. Through the deliberate and conspiratorial destruction of our social structures, lore, custom and practice, there was a coordinated attempt to strip us of our identity and culture.

Like many Aboriginal nations across Australia, our people were killed, moved and put on reserves and missions, forced to work for rations, little money or nothing at all. We were treated akin to flora and fauna and through successive government policies of assimilation, it was made illegal to speak our language or practise our culture. And for many mobs around the country, it meant that language became critically endangered, and in some cases, extinct.

As a child who grew up on my grandfather’s country, I would only hear Pop occasionally speak in language around the house. His fluency in language sadly became scarce among our people. Of course, Dunghutti words used more frequently than others became interchangeable for their English counterparts and a hybrid dialogue developed at our place and in other homes around town. But as the Elders of Pop’s generation passed into the Dreaming, our language became increasingly rare.

Unsurprisingly, the decreased use of language and practice of traditional custom has run in parallel to the decrease in social outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. These negative and devastating impacts on our mobs show that when culture, custom and language are compromised, so too is our overall wellbeing.

Despite this dark, contemporary history, much of it in living memory, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have stood firm. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are healers; around the country we have evoked our warrior spirit to restore and revitalise our languages. This movement is a part of a broader reclamation and revitalisation of our customs and practice. It’s a move to instil pride in identity for our young people; it is a mark that we are still here.

I spoke with emerging respected Elders of the Dunghutti people, Uncle Robert ‘Bob’ Smith and Aunty Caroline Bradshaw: two remarkable warriors who are among a number of other leaders in the Macleay Valley revitalising our language on our terms.

Josh Smith: Is it fair to say that Aboriginal languages, like the Dunghutti language, were hidden, or close to extinct?

Uncle Robert ‘Bob’ Smith: No, I don’t think it’s fair to say that. It was suppressed and discouraged with harsh retribution if you were heard speaking in lingo. It was prohibited, along with our ceremonies; however the Dunghutti people found ways around this barrier and many of the old people retained this knowledge and fluency of our language into the 1960s despite all the efforts of government policies to do otherwise. I think the last traditional Marrwan initiation ceremony took place in Bellbrook around 1935. The Marrwan is the second of four levels of initiation of the Dunghutti.

Aunty Caroline Bradshaw: It was illegal to speak it and there was the risk of going to jail, but our old people still spoke it in their homes when no one was around. When linguists would come to town and do recordings, they would speak it then. But because it wasn’t allowed to be spoken publicly, we lost fluent speakers.

RS: A lot of the able men used to be rounded up by the Mission Manager and forced to go with white landholders up bush, for what Dad used to call slave labour. They would be dropped off up bush with their swags, and told to do fencing or clearing. They would get two shillings per day. But while they were out bush, with no one else around, they would speak in language. That’s how it survived in those early days, along with our ceremonies, whilst neighbouring tribes slowly saw theirs disappear.

CB: See, the old people would still speak to each other in Dunghutti, and so we would pick up some words here and there. Common words like birrin (bread) or murra (hair) were picked up around the dinner table and [are] still used in community today. Or when they would have arguments, or didn’t want other people to know what was being said, they would speak in language.

What’s involved in revitalising language?

CB: It’s been a long process. It started when I was doing my teaching degree and majored in Dunghutti language. But it wasn’t until our old people, like Aunty Rita Scott, started to build their confidence and I could convince them to come into schools. The old people were worried for a long time that teaching our language wouldn’t be done correctly. You know, like words wouldn’t be pronounced correctly, or sentences not constructed in the right order, and that would change the language. So it had to be led by Dunghutti community, and those old people had to be confident that it was going to be taught right.

For example, to learn Dunghutti, you have to first understand the difference between adjectives, nouns [and] verbs, because it’s important to understand the difference in how to put a sentence together. It’s not like English. For example, you can’t just add an ‘s’ to a word to make it plural. The word for ‘aunty’ in Dunghutti is gila, to have more than one aunty isn’t gilas, you add an ‘n’ to make it a plural: gilan. But there are different rules depending on the word, so we had to maintain the integrity of the language.

There was an attempt back in the 1970s by a priest to work with Elders from Dunghutti and Gumbaynggirr in Sherwood Hall. There are similarities in language with neighbouring mobs like the Gumbaynggirr to the north and Anaiwan to the west. We have similar words or words that are the same probably based on trading relationships with those neighbours. But our Elders weren’t interested; they wanted to hold our language, so the focus went to Gumbaynggirr. It wasn’t until much later that we did it, and only when our old people were comfortable and confident.

We had to go back to old recordings, done by the linguists that would visit town and work with the handful of Elders that still spoke, or understood [the language]. That was another thing that delayed us. A lot of the recordings were taken off country and stored in libraries in Canberra. Our old people felt strongly that our language should not have been taken off country. It should have stayed here with them. It wasn’t until the 1990s when we started, with some of the old people, going into Green Hill, Bellbrook and Milbank primary schools to start to teach Dunghutti. I try to make language accessible for the children to learn. The dictionaries compiled by the linguists are very technical. It must be accessible for community members, so I am trying to do that through the resources we develop and how we teach. We work with educators in the different schools to teach them about language so they can teach it to the children.

RS: Yes, the pronunciation and the rules around sentence structure and suffixes is very different to English. The way the linguists record and write our language can make your head spin, with different rules applied here and there. It has to be accessible, and easily understood, especially for the kids. The Department of Education has developed five ‘language nests’ across New South Wales that are supposed to develop cultural material to enable our kids to be taught language and pay the wages of local tutors. The issue is that you have to be a TAFE-certified language tutor to run the program. So you’ve got non-Aboriginal people, or people from not around here, trying to teach our language, a language they don’t know or understand. It has to be community-led. Dunghutti people can’t be excluded.

It’s the International Year of Indigenous Languages. Why is it important to have a focus on Indigenous languages?

CB: You know Josh, for me, we have a very multicultural society. And people that live here from other countries, they speak their languages. For me it’s sad, it really makes me sad, that we as the First Peoples of this country aren’t able to speak our languages fluently. That’s why it’s important to focus on it. And it’s great to see our language getting out there and being used by our young ones. It’s more common now for our kids to be doing ‘welcome to country’ in Dunghutti language at school, or for the opening of the local show. Even Greg Inglis did a Dunghutti war-cry at the beginning of the Indigenous All Stars game.

RS: You see the Maori people speaking their language, you see it as part of their culture. You even see non-Maori [people] using Maori language. Maybe it’s because they have the Treaty of Waitangi, I don’t know. As Aboriginal people, we should be able to do that too. It’s part of [our] nation’s identity; it’s part of our identity. It should be celebrated. However, we don’t have a treaty.

Why is the revitalisation of the Dunghutti language important to you?

RS: It’s about identity. The word ‘Aboriginal’ is a Latin word meaning ‘first people’. Before Europeans, we identified by our language groups. So for me to say that I am Dunghutti means that other people can place me as being from the north coast of New South Wales. It instils a sense of pride—a pride in yourself, in your community, in your people. I love hearing our language being spoken and knowing that it comes from my country. It’s also important for us as people to maintain our connection to land. In our successful land claim at Crescent Head, it was successful because we could show to the courts that our language and customs and knowledge had survived and are still present with us to this day. I work in schools and you see our kids trying to emulate American culture and identity by the way they talk, the music they listen to. Sadly, many know more about that than their own identity.

CB: It is about identity and connection—connection to our land. Our connection is stronger than others’. We, as Dunghutti people, care for our land—more so than other people that come to live here. It’s about our connection to our old people and to each other: our connection to bloodlines, our Dreaming, our stories and culture. You can see it in our young people when they don’t know who they are, what their connections are—they seem lost. There’s a few young ones now that know language and their identity. You can see it in the pre-schoolers and younger kids: this big sense of pride when they’ve done a performance or song in language. The older kids take a little more to get into it, but you see the pride and sense of accomplishment build in them too.

Language can help you connect. I was speaking with a grandmother who had heard her granddaughter speak in Dunghutti at a school function. It made this grandmother cry. She was so proud and moved to hear her granddaughter speak her language. It brought back memories of her childhood and using language, and she started to speak it at home again to her grandchildren, correcting them when they structured their sentences incorrectly. To me, it’s about these relationships, it’s about our people’s survival, it’s about our strength.

The seemingly small steps taken in a small town on the coast of New South Wales are leaving an indelible mark on the nation and humanity. Despite the attempts to assimilate or eradicate us as peoples on our own lands, our Aboriginal warrior spirit has remained strong.

The revitalisation and reclamation of Indigenous languages across the country, and the globe, make us collectively more enriched. As an Aboriginal man I am indebted to my grandfather’s generation and those who went before him that shed blood to protect what is sacred to us. I am grateful for people like Uncle Bob and Aunty Caroline who have lived through the assimilation policies of governments and the attempts to shame us as a race. I am grateful that because of all of them, my daughters, who are now three and one, have the opportunity to grow strong in their identity and embrace their language.