Now you're talking . . . Pitjantjatjara (fwd)

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Now you're talking . . . Pitjantjatjara

Victoria Laurie
12sep05
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16567467%255E16947,00.html

A CITY audience is invited to learn a Central Australian language in
order to fully appreciate a theatrical production. The staff of a
leading arts festival sign up for lessons in a southwest Aboriginal
language. An Aboriginal linguist is asked to turn actors' lines into an
indigenous language from regional Victoria.

Is "language" gaining favour in Australia's cultural circles? And does
it move beyond token interest into a real conversation between black
and white Australia?

Lindy Hume, artistic director of the Perth International Arts Festival,
thinks it can. For several months, she and her staff have taken lessons
in the southwest Aboriginal language of Noongar. During last week's
launch of indigenous highlights of her 2006 festival, she put a few
words of her newly acquired vocabulary to use.

When Perth's festival begins next February, its centrepiece will be
Ngallak Koort Boodja, a large canvas painted by six artists who are
among 90 Noongar elders consulted by the festival.

Hume mocks her own tongue-tied attempts at speaking Noongar, but
believes that even a tiny smattering is a proper basis for dialogue
with Western Australia's southwest indigenous culture.

"For one thing, it's incredibly long overdue," says Hume. "This festival
has been sitting on Noongar land for over 50 years and we haven't ever
done something like this. So it's something that needed to happen. Who
are these people around us now and how do they perceive their
relationship to country?"

Speaking "language" is being embraced in the arts, and no longer in
purely symbolic ways. Welcome-to-country ceremonies are now an accepted
gesture at many cultural and government events. And indigenous language
has long featured in music and visual arts in song lyrics, on canvas
and in bilingual catalogues.

But even the 20 most robust indigenous languages - out of an original
250 - have made little mark on Australia's cultural scene, perhaps
unsurprising in a country that spends eight times more on educating
children to speak Indonesian than Aboriginal languages in schools.

Now decades of indifference may be ending. Rolf de Heer's forthcoming
Ten Canoes is the first Australian film to be made entirely in an
Aboriginal language. And in Walkabout, a recent stage version of the
famous 1971 film, director Richard Frankland sought out linguists to
translate an actor's lines into the Gunditjmara language of
southwestern Victoria.

But a far more ambitious idea is to co-opt an entire theatre audience
into taking a short course in Pitjantjatjara language. This is the aim
of Ngapartji Ngapartji, an emerging work that will be staged in pilot
form at the Melbourne Festival in October. Created by indigenous West
Australian performer Trevor Jamieson and director Scott Rankin, the
show is billed as an attempt "to help protect, preserve and share an
endangered indigenous language".

"There is no national indigenous language policy and that is a kind of
cultural genocide," says Rankin, adding that Australia is home to "the
most fragile" languages in the world. "We should be aghast at the way
we're letting languages go."

Ngapartji Ngapartji's audience members will be invited to take a series
of language lessons via the web, or in person through a language kiosk
set up at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Over
five nights of a trial season, they will attend a short performance by
Pitjantjatjara young people and elders; next year, the performances
will be extended to a two-hour show, by which time Rankin hopes the
audience will have opted to participate in a longer online language
course. He is thrilled that this October's festival shows have already
sold out: "It shows there's a definite interest out there."

Cynics might query the point of middle-class white Australians tackling
a desert language. "It's a desire to add to one's own life experience;
one could say it's selfish, but I think it's healthy," Rankin says.

The Perth festival's close partnership with Noongar elders has been a
life-changing experience for general manager Wendy Wise. "I grew up in
Noongar country on a farm, and during those years I had absolutely no
knowledge of the culture. Aboriginal people - I didn't even know the
word Noongar - lived out of town on a reserve, but I didn't know why.

"This project has made me look at the whole community in a completely
different way. It's more unified than people give them credit for, and
the fact that we're trying to learn Noongar is a really important
thing."

Almost any well-meaning use of language seems acceptable to indigenous
speakers. Events manager Sarah Bond was contacted early this year by
Melbourne's Moomba Waterfest to provide original music in an indigenous
language to accompany a gymnastics float. She happily obliged, ushering
Walkabout director-songwriter Frankland and indigenous speaker Joy
Murphy into a studio to record a song in Murphy's Woiwurrung language.
Bond says her only non-negotiable rule was that a key participant in
any project comes from the language group concerned.

Her next aim is to invite indigenous artists from across the nation to
translate into their own languages a single English verse from popular
songs such as We Have Survived by No Fixed Address and Shane Howard's
Solid Rock.

Linguistic expertise is increasingly being sought by arts agencies. In
Victoria, they knock on the door of the Victorian Aboriginal
Corporation for Languages, set up in 1984 to maintain and promote
Aboriginal language. "Quite often we are asked to give an indigenous
name to a project," says manager Paul Paton. He says Arts Victoria,
Ausdance and the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development
Assocation recently asked for help in naming a new training program for
indigenous dancers.

"We'll come up with [several language] options and refer them to the
particular communities to endorse the use of their language," says
Paton. "Sometimes it doesn't get the go-ahead."

Paton strongly rejects the notion that merely naming something is a
trivial use of Aboriginal words. "It stimulates the use of language
every time anyone talks about the project. It becomes more everyday in
its use."

Vicki Couzens is a VACL board member, artist and community language
worker from the Western District of Victoria. Her native language,
Keerray Wurrong, was nearly silenced forever until last-minute efforts
revived it. "We had no living speakers, only a tape in Canberra," she
recalls of the language's lowest moment. "We referred to it as a
'sleeping' language, not a dead one. Dad researched and retrieved it
and had it published into a dictionary."

These days Couzens titles all her paintings in Keerray Wurrong; she
swaps phone calls and email messages in the language with a linguist
cousin. "If I learn a new word, I think, 'This'll challenge him'," she
says gleefully. "His son is four and is being raised bilingual, so I've
got to get my grandkids bilingual."

Couzens found language sharing linked up indigenous, migrant and refugee
women in a weaving project she and another artist ran in the southwest
Victorian town of Warrnambool. "I'd say, 'What's your word for basket?'
and we'd weave the words with the fibres into the baskets." The result,
an exhibition called Woven Land, was so striking that Craft Victoria
transferred the regional exhibition to Melbourne in May.

Couzens is now involved in a project for the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
"It will acknowledge the 36 languages remaining in Victoria and give
them some involvement," she says.

"Aboriginal people are taking back control of their language. Language
is central to identity and culture and relationship. It's about
strengthening the people."

© The Australian