Reconciliation and Social Justice Library
Reconciliation and Social Justice Library
2.7 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages have been poorly understood by non-ATSI people over the last 200 years. Few took the trouble to learn them or understand their nature. Instead ATSI people's tradition of multilingualism saw them learn European languages (overwhelmingly English). Although the ATSI tradition of multilingualism may have made it easier to learn English, colonial domination undoubtedly was a major factor. This lack of knowledge about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages together with other attitudes of the colonisers resulted in a number of misconceptions; some of which still have currency.
2.8 European settlers assessed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander technology and material goods as primitive. As a consequence they assumed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language and culture must also be inferior. They did not comprehend the multiplicity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations and ATSI people's complex social and intellectual developments. This prejudice, born out of an ignorance of the languages and culture that existed, led to persistent efforts to eradicate ATSI cultures and languages.
2.9 The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody observed:
Every turn in the policy of government and the practice of the non-ATSI community was postulated on the inferiority of the Aboriginal people; the original expropriation of their land was based on the idea that the land was not occupied and the people uncivilised; the protection policy was based on the view that Aboriginal people could not achieve a place in the non-ATSI society and that they must be protected against themselves while the race died out; the assimilationist policy assumed that their culture and way of life is without value and that we confer a favour on them by assimilating them into our ways; even to the point of taking their children and removing them from family. 15
The Royal Commission concluded:
The damage to Aboriginal society was devastating. In some places, it totally destroyed population. In others, dependency, despair, alcohol, total loss of heart wrought decimation of culture. 16
2.10 The pidgin English sometimes used was mistakenly viewed as an ATSI language and dismissed as primitive. Alternatively, it was viewed as an incapacity to learn English properly. Professor Dixon places this in perspective by noting:
Aboriginal Australians were eager and able to learn normal English, if they were exposed to it. But they were often not addressed in the standard dialect. The pioneer missionary E.R.B Gribble described a typical situation around 1900: 'in the early days of our work pidgin English was used by us all, and a beastly gibberish it was. As time passed, I determined that it should cease, and good English be used; and, strange to say, the people seemed to find it easier to avoid than did the staff who had got so accustomed to its use that they found it extremely difficult to avoid addressing in pidgin English every black they met.' It was because they were spoken to in this way, that Aboriginal Australians initially adopted a poor type of pidgin English. As T.G.H. Streblow put it, with typical directness: 'Northern Territory pidgin English is not English perverted and mangled by the natives; it is English perverted and mangled by ignorant whites, who have in turn taught this ridiculous gibberish to the natives and who then affect to be amused by the childish babbling of these "savages"'. 17
2.11 The poor assessment of indigenous languages by Europeans was not uncommon at the time. Harris and Sandefur report:
With the great colonial expansion and the accompanying linguistic imperialism, many new languages were encountered and the accusation of inadequacy now fell upon these so-called 'primitive' languages of illiterate cultures. Linguistic research eventually showed the accusation of inadequacy to be false. 18
When unbiased observers began to look at the so-called 'primitive' languages, however, they often met with intricacies of grammatical organisation that were not found in the languages familiar to them. Thus, the notion that there were developed and underdeveloped languages began to make way, in the late 19th century, to the now generally accepted view that all human languages are of comparable grammatical complexity and that the many surface dissimilarities found in the languages of the world are all manifestations of a deeper universal 'human language capacity'. 19