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Abstract
An attempt is made to redress the lack of scholarly attention that Daisy Bates’ (1859–1951) contribution to Australian Aboriginal linguistics has received compared with her anthropological work and her contribution to Aboriginal policy by describing and evaluating her documentation of Kimberley languages. Her work includes manuscript and typescript wordlists and short sentences in a number of Kimberley languages; these are held in the Bates archives in the National Library of Australia, Canberra. Some of the materials were gathered by her, and date from the turn of the twentieth century, when Daisy Bates assisted in the refurbishment of the Beagle Bay Mission before its transfer from the Trappist order to the Pallottines, and from the short time she resided at Roebuck Plains station with her husband. Other data was collected by whites working in the region as postmen, pastoralists, teachers, missionaries, etc. It is argued that the main value of these documentations lies in the information they provide on a number of now extinct and/or moribund languages; indeed for some languages the information she provides represents virtually the totality of information available.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the first conference of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific, SHLP1, 1st August 2008 and to the Henry Sweet Society Annual Colloquium, Jesus College, 14–17th September 2009. I am grateful to the audiences at these presentations for useful comments and questions, and to an anonymous referee for comments.
Notes
1 Other sources (e.g. Salter 1971: 2) give 1863 as the year of her birth. However, according to White (1985: 31) research in Ireland has shown that the earlier date is correct.
2 Bates kept the manuscript for nearly half a century, intending to do something with it. However, by 1947 it had become clear to her that due to age and ill health she never would, and she sent it to the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sept-Fons, in the French village of Dompierre-sur-Besbre: It is because of my desire that the Trappists great work should not be forgotten, & also because the dictionary is so representative of their wonderful labours in compiling it — & the value of the dictionary itself as proof of their great labours that I think it should be placed in the Sept-Fons Archives as indisputable evidence of that Missions literary labours. (Letter from Daisy Bates to Lord Abbot of Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sept-Fons, January 1947; original held in archives of Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sept-Fons)
3 Some of these materials are also held in the National Library of Australia. I have not had the opportunity to compare the holdings in the three libraries.
4 Where possible, I use the modern accepted spellings. In those cases, Bates’ spellings are given in brackets. (*) indicates that lexical and/or grammatical information on the language is provided in MS 365.
5 Daisy Bates also produced a ‘Dialectic Map of Western Australia’ (1907), but this includes only five of the names in the following list, and uses different spellings for two of them.
6 Unaccountably Jukun is missing from the list in Bates (1985), although it figures prominently in the archives.
7 This, and the following three tribal names, was supplied by a Kimberley prisoner on Rottnest Island.
8 This label is completely unknown to me, and there is no information permitting one to guess the identity of the language or group.
9 As usual, one needs to maintain a critical attitude to what Bates says: her claims about methods are sometimes as mendacious as her claims about her childhood and origins, about which she manifestly lied on many occa- sions for political and social reasons (e.g. Reece 2007: 1–3). As illustration, consider the following fatuous observation: ‘Sitting in a neighbouring creek-bed, or boiling the billy by an old tank out on the plain, the men would gather round me, taking infinite pains to tutor me in the rippling inflexions and the difficult double vowels of their language — a series of vocal gymnastics quite impossible to the average white linguist, and which, I am perfectly sure, in all my juggling with them, have altered the formation of my larynx’ (Bates 1938/1966: 25). Contrary to Reece, we cannot take as gospel what Bates says about Australian Aboriginal social life and languages because she had nothing to gain by lying about them. As the above quote demonstrates, the exigencies of a good story and/or the imperative of presenting herself as outstanding did motivate her to embellish the reality. And in a wider context, she may well have lied about being incorporated into Aboriginal society as a reincarnated spirit being in order to bolster her claims to secret-sacred knowledge, about the extent of cannibalism to promote the saleability of her articles, and perhaps even to undermine anthropologists like A. P. Elkin and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in a bid to establish herself as sole authority on Aborigines.
10 The number of header glosses is by my count just over 1800 (with some repetitions); the additional example sentences may perhaps take the total up to about 2000 lexical glosses.
11 Given the format of the sentences, it is difficult to retain a straight face on reading the introduction to this section: ‘As the Australian language does not obviously admit much refinement in the rules of grammatical construction, the sentences given below are written grammatically only for the sake of euphony’!!
12 I have scanned the somewhat over 200 pages of handwritten letters from Bates to FitzHerbert in Folio 87/1–135 without locating reference to this putative RGS vocabulary. It may of course be in letters not held in the National Library of Australia.
13 In a collection of Hints for travellers, Raper and FitzRoy (1854: 356) provide some advice on gathering ethno- graphic information, including obtaining vocabularies. However, no information is provided of the range of items to be collected except that they should be ‘phrases rather than single words’. Two pages later, under the subheading Language in Ethnology and statistics, the traveller is advised to collect information on the following: ‘Literature, Books, MSS., Inscriptions, Picture writings, Songs, Tales, &c.; Vocabularies of natural objects, qualities, action, relationship, numerals, pronouns, positionals, &c.; Grammatical Variation of Words; Construction of Sentences; Dialectic Variations; Intonation and peculiar Utterances; Geographical Distribution of the Language’ (Raper and FitzRoy 1854: 358). This is a far cry from a prototype 2000 wordlist.
14 Bates is not entirely consistent in her labelling of Billingee’s language. Usually it is represented as Jukun, but occasionally she says he spoke the Ngumbarl dialect, and in XII 2E 1a Folio 3 she gives both alternatives. Available evidence indicates that Jukun was spoken closer to Broome than Ngumbarl, and if Billingee was a native of the Willie Creek area, most likely he would have been Jukun.
15 According to de Vries (2008: 146) Billingee was a ‘crippled Jukun-Ngumbari [sic] man’ who provided Bates with a set of sketches and carvings. She goes on to say that ‘Billingee told Daisy that his country stretched from Beagle Bay, 120 kilometres north of Broome, to Roebourne, and helped her to compile a vocabulary of his language. Their linguistic collaboration lasted from 1907 until 1912’. I can find no reference in Bates’ writings of any claim to such an absurdly large territory for Jukun, or that the vocabulary was compiled in these years, when Bates was nowhere in the vicinity of Broome. A handwritten note on the top of XIII 11 (d) (ii) Folio 72/2 indicates that the information on Jukun was in fact recorded in 1902. de Vries’ text implies that Bates met Billingee somewhere between Perth and Esperance; I am aware of nothing in Bates’ manuscripts that is consistent with this, and Bates (1985: 268) strongly suggests that Billingee resided in Broome.
16 I use angle brackets to indicate graphemic representation of the source document.
17 Retroflex consonants often induce r-colouring on the previous vowel, which was perceptible to some untrained observers.
18 I represent Bates’ examples in a four-line format, as follows: the first line shows her transcription; the second line, in italics, indicates my best guess as to the phonemic representation and morphological division; the third line provides my glosses; and the final line gives a free translation in single quotes (if mine) or in double quotes (Bates’ translation). The following abbreviations are used (following the Leipzig glossing rules as far as possible): ALL — allative; AUG — augmented number; CM — conjugation marker; ERG — ergative; FUT — future; IRR — irrealis; MIN — minimal number; NOM — nominative; and OBL — oblique. The first three numerals indicate the three persons, and inflecting verbs are cited in capitals, following a convention I have used in other writings.
19 Interestingly, Nekes and Worms (1953: 425) give the form delar delar ‘sound of hammering or cutting wood; be hammering’ in the Western Nyulnyulan languages Bardi, Nyulnyul, Jabirrjabirr, and Nimanburru.
20 Note that in this example Daisy Bates has misidentified word boundaries, and included the free word for ‘water’ within the boundaries of the inflected form of the verb ‘see’.
21 This is not to say that observations are entirely absent from the documentations. Thus, Bates does comment (XII 2E 1a, folio 52/9) that the word <lēan> ‘windpipe’, ‘the source of the breath, as it were, [is] also used as an equivalent of ‘like’, ‘love’ or ‘want’’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
William B McGregor
William B. McGregor is professor of linguistics at Aarhus University. He has been conducting research on languages of the Kimberley region for the past 30 years, and has published a number of grammars and sketch grammars, as well as numerous articles on the languages. He has a strong interest in the history of research on Kimberley languages, and the interpretation and use of historical sources in their documentation and description.
Correspondence to: Afdeling for Lingvistik, Institut for Antropologi, Arkæologi og Lingvistik, Aarhus Universitet, Building 1410, Ndr. Ringgade, DK-8000 Århus C, Denmark; Email: [email protected].