‘That’s white fellow’s talk you know, missis’

Abstract

Colonial linguistic studies are complex and intriguing textual sources that reveal much about everyday life and knowledge production under frontier conditions. Halfway through her Kamilaroi vocabulary, the Irish-Australian poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop recorded the phrase: 'Yalla murrethoo gwalda [.] moorguia binna / Speak in your own language[.] I want to learn as I am stupid.' 1 Dunlop's self-positioning is clearly designed to put her Indigenous teachers at ease, setting the terms for her instruction. Yet as the phrase suggests, for Europeans in the Australian colonies, learning Indigenous languages could be an unsettling experience. Curious settlers placed themselves in awkward, dependent relationships with Indigenous people, whose motivations to engage with and teach settlers were various, but whose patience and precision were noted by those attempting to learn. So too their frustration and amusement: the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld described how Indigenous men such as his long-term collaborator Biraban 'shew the greatest readiness in pronouncing again and again not without laughing at my stupidity in not understanding quickly' when he attempted to learn the Awabakal language from Newcastle. 2 As David A. Roberts notes, this was 'a humbling experience, laden with rich, self-effacing moments that unsettled his cultural assumptions. … At a time when much opinion was being aired about the supposed innate deficiency of the Aboriginal intellect, Threlkeld was moved to remark that his Aboriginal tutors thought him somewhat dim-witted in not being able to easily attain their native language'. 3 This chapter uses the archival traces left by two colonial women to explore the relationship between language study and knowledge production, paying particular attention to linguistic texts that reveal traces of cross-cultural relationships and the Indigenous intermediaries who engaged in knowledgemaking practices across the contact zone. In 1838, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop arrived from Ireland with her family: she was already a published poet with 13 'That's white fellow's talk you know, missis': wordlists, songs, and knowledge production on the colonial Australian frontier