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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Tazin Abdullah and I'm a PhD candidate in linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Laura Rademaker. Laura is a DECRA research fellow at the School of History at the Australian National University in Canberra. She works in the areas of interdisciplinary histories as well as oral history and memories, with a special interest in cross culturalizing history. Her interests include religion, gender secularization and deep history. She is an editor of History Australia Monographs, Editor for Aboriginal History Monographs, and Secretary of the Religious History Association. On this episode, we will find out about Laura's work with a special focus on her 2018 book, found in Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission. Laura's work in this book provides a highly engaging exploration of the intersection between English, Christianity and Australian citizenship. Set against the interactions between Christian missionaries and Indigenous Australians, we learn about the deep intricacies of the relationship between language and places. I'm very excited about this podcast and Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor.
- [01:29]
B
To begin with, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your research and how you came to be interested in historical language contact? Sure.
- [01:37]
A
So I'm an historian down at Anu, as you said, I'm not an indigenous person myself. I became interested in, I guess, the interactions that happened at Christian missions in Australia, particularly after I. So I did an honours thesis way back when men in the day, it was soon after the apology to the stolen generation by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. And I learned from this that. So I come from a church background, I learned from this that my own church had been part of, had been complicit in the removal of children. And I did a thesis looking at the white women who, I mean, you could say looked after, you could say were guardians who were the, you know who. I mean, looking after isn't the right term really. Like these are kidnapped children, but the women who took in these children in a remote mission on Groot Island. But doing that thesis, it was increasingly led to question how did these people from completely different cultural backgrounds, how did they communicate with each other? How did they understand each other? What did they make of each other? Have these children from remote communities didn't speak English, maybe spoke a little bit of pidgin and later Creole. And these white women coming up from Sydney and Melbourne who only spoke English and had very fixed ideas about what they wanted to impart to these children. I wondered, what did these children make all of that? And what did the Aboriginal communities who surrounded them and who were sort of looking on to the mission, what did they make of that? Also, way back, even longer, before this honest thesis, I was a Rotary exchange student in Denmark. Oh, wow, you speak Danish when I was there. Well, you know, imperfectly. And my Danish is rubbish today. Don't ask me to speak Danish. But something that I really took out of that experience was the significance for people, especially people who speak a language which is not, you know, not widely spoken. It really mattered to the Danes that I was with, that I was learning their language. And they were really excited that someone would learn Danish which they thought was of no use apart from to have better relationships with Danish people. And so that's kind of stuck in my mind that the significance of languages for smaller communities, that's amazing.
- [03:54]
B
Especially in the context of today, when people learn language from apps, what, you know, the difference between what you described, learning a language while interacting with people as opposed to learning a language from an app. It's amazing that that's what inspired you.
- [04:10]
A
Yeah. And it's actually. It's something that came up in the research. I mean, we'll talk about this later. But I was interested in why some missionaries learned aboriginal languages and why others didn't. And the relational dynamic is really what's important. I think teaching someone your language is an act of hospitality, is an act of generosity. It's relational. And you can't barge into a language community without an invitation or a welcome, or at least that's the way I said. And so having these unique and precious languages as a way for indigenous people to control who entered their worlds and to exclude people who are not welcome.
- [04:46]
B
Wow. Well, turning to your book, I would like to ask you about a quote from the preface. And I use this because I found it very meaningful personally. And, you know, I felt like it is the basic philosophical question about translation. So in the preface, you say whether translation and all the ambiguities that might attend it was a blessing or a curse is a matter of interpretation. Could you tell us about this?
- [05:10]
A
Yeah, I mean, this was really the, you know, my core interest that was driving this. I'm interested in the way that translation, you know, of languages, but also more broadly, in a sort of a metaphorical sense of cultures, or the way it creates something new in the encounter. You can say. You can say all translation is imperfect, but even the label imperfect kind of puts a value judgment on it that it's deficient, but it's those so called imperfections that actually where there's something creative in this cross cultural encounter that can come out and there can be learning from different peoples. And I think in my research, what I was really interested in exploring was the way that first nations people were able to take what missionaries brought and create something new on their own terms. Because of the ambiguities of translation. Yeah, but we tend, I mean you tend to put there's terms like imperfect or unfaithful and things like this that really do have that value judgment. And I wanted to really push back on this, but in the. Sorry, I'm going. I'm pleased. This is very interesting. In the context of colonialism and imperialism and these missions which were really trying to form people into being a particular kind of person and a particular kind of Christian, there was the desire to have a so called perfect translation and convey this unchanging message that would be received in a predictable way. But because of the ambiguities of translation, that wasn't possible. And that's happened again and again, not just in Australia. Yes, of course, in many contexts.
- [06:42]
B
Yeah. And then the way that I guess it was received and whether it was beneficial to the people receiving it is, as you say, a matter of interpretation.
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A
Yes, exactly. The communities have different, you know, individual members and communities have different views on this as well. Yes, of course.
- [06:58]
B
Yeah. That's amazing. You write about the Northern Territory, that's your research site, as iconic being Australia's settler colonial frontier. What is unique about the context that you have written about? And why were language and translation so significant in this context?
- [07:15]
A
Sure. Look, I, as a kid, my family did a lot of. We did a lot of road trips and camping trips and stuff and I traveled to the Northern Territory quite a bit as a child. And I guess for me it has this nostalgic, you know, it's still that, you know, I kind of had bought into that almost frontier romantic mindset about this wild landscape that was, you know, but somehow represented the true, the real Australia. I hope that I've been able to mature from that and become a bit more. Are critical of the way that those visions actually sort of reinforce a settler colonial or colonial ideology that the country is naturally belonging to white people. And anyway, this romantic vision of empty space ready to be sort of civilized or tamed or something. Anyway, so I came to it with that background. But in terms of as a researcher and as an historian, what's really exciting is I guess the way for Many communities in the Northern Territory, colonization, the beginning of colonization, is still such recent history. You know, when I was doing oral histories up on Groot island, the people I spoke with, it was their parents who had first, who first encountered white people in their country. And they remember as children the missions first being set up. This was the first non indigenous communities setting up on their country, you know, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. That was a living memory. So it's really, really recent history. And as an historian, this is, you know, being able to sit down and talk with people about what that experience was like and what it meant to their communities is fascinating and sheds light on earlier periods for which we can't do oral histories. The mission encounter and the Christian missions and happened so much later in Australia. One of the stats that I sort of throw around is in the 1950s and the 1960s, Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were the most missionized people in the ent entire world. I think there was one missionary for every sort of five to six Aboriginal people in the territory. Like, it was crazy, the level of intensity of this civilizing, Christianizing project that was going on up there. So it's really a really intense encounter as well as a really recent history that then can help us understand sort of much more global experiences that happened in other places. I mean, I can go on. The other thing about the Northern Territory is so many Aboriginal languages in the Territory are still so strong. They're spoken by children. They're still people's first languages. And one thing that I think is really helpful for me as a researcher is to have that experience of being the outsider and being unsettled as the English speaker. It reminds me that English is not naturally the language of this country. But I, as an English speaker, English doesn't necessarily belong. And I have to be the learner. I have to sometimes make a fool of myself because I don't understand or I'm trying to say something that, you know, is pronounced the wrong way or means something different. But that I think. I mean, I hope that comes through in my writing. Having. Having that experience and seeing unsettling how natural English feels in this place.
- [10:38]
B
Well, I mean, from what you just said, I guess I'm taking away again how recent the history is, as you said, because sometimes we get this idea that all of these things happened in the past and it's way back there, but it's not. And the impacts, as you have written in your book, actually last till today.
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A
I mean, colonization is still continuing, I would say, but also yeah, there's people in living memory who can speak about massacres, knowing about massacres and things like that, really not very long ago at all.
- [11:05]
B
And much of that knowledge would also be in their languages too, in their native languages. Wow. I understand that the early missionary ventures in Australia were not very successful. And how did the Christian missionaries attempt to engage with Aboriginal communities? What were the tensions, the multiple elements that influenced their language use and interactions?
- [11:28]
A
Yeah, yeah. So this is something I puzzled over for a while and I'm still, still thinking through, trying to understand as an historian. So the Christian missions in Australia were quite famously unsuccessful at the time. I'm talking about the early 19th century. And this was often blamed on Aboriginal people themselves. Especially as you move through the 19th century, there was the argument that Aboriginal people lacks the cognitive ability to understand Christianity, that they maybe didn't even have souls, that they were not, you know, religious being. They couldn't have. They weren't. You know, their culture was supposedly so backwards, things like this, you know, really horrifically racist ideas. But it is, I mean, when you look to the, you know, to the nearby Pacific, at the same time in the early 19th century, Christianity and demand for translated Bibles is really expanding quite quickly. So what, you know, what could possibly explain this one thing sort of structurally about Australia is that the Christian missions arrived more or less simultaneously or just after settler colonizers who were claiming Aboriginal land. And so the massacres, the displacement, the dispossession of land, the disease, all of this proceeds or is concurrent with missionaries. And I think in that context, I mean, Aboriginal people could see the contradiction. Right? And the missionaries were ultimately, as much as many of them were quite critical of the violence and, you know, supported humanitarian causes. They were ultimately allied with the British Empire, which was responsible for all of this that was taking place. And so to convert to Christianity in that context is a capitulation to this devastating destruction. At the same time, there wasn't much, I mean, in terms of Protestant tradition, translating the Bible is kind of the number one thing you do when you arrive in a new culture, because you want the Christian message to be taken up in the culture of the people that you're trying to convert. And this, I mean, there were small attempts in Australia, but there was no translated Bible until, I think it was full Bible in an aboriginal language until 2002, maybe it was 2004. Anyway, it was in the 2000s, very, very recent. There were early missionaries who translated segments of scriptures, but there wasn't sort of large scale Bible translation work. In Australia. And this, I would say, was due to. Due to the belief that Aboriginal people were destined to extinction or that if they were to survive, their future was going to be in English. Now we're going to assimilate into white Australia. And so we have these sort of colonizing assumptions about the naturalness of English, the dominance of English, the naturalness of British possession of Australian soil right there from the beginning in these decisions not to translate, and the belief in the universality of English.
- [14:17]
B
And do you think the other aspect may have been the multiplicity of Aboriginal languages as well? Because there wasn't just one language for the.
- [14:24]
A
Yes, true. And I should have said that, yes. I mean, there's many Aboriginal languages are closely related and mutually intelligible, but there's so many languages. But I would also say that that was used as an excuse. There was sort of often that, whoa, well, there's this language and that language. Which language? Do we do that? It's better that everybody just speak English. And so it sort of cuts both ways.
- [14:44]
B
That's so interesting. And I'll pick up on that with you a bit later because you know that there's so many parallels with language in the use of English in Australia even now. But before that, I actually wanted to say that I learned a lot from reading your book. And one of the most interesting things I learned was that the Anin Diliakoa speakers had for centuries already been engaging in the translation and interpretation of language and culture. So there was language contact between tribes and with those from other lands, such as the Maccasons. And as I was reading, I pictured, you know, people who are multilingual in a society where there already existed a sophisticated exchange between languages. And in this setting came the missionaries with English, a language, as you said, tied to settler colonialism and to citizenship in, you know, in Australia. Would you please tell us about this?
- [15:33]
A
Yeah. So this is. I mean, again, I'm not a First nations person. I don't speak for first nations people. But this is all across, you know, the top end of the Northern Territory. Multilingualism in Indigenous communities is the norm and has been the norm for centuries. For Indigenous communities, marriage is often exogamous. You marry outside your clan, which is also normally, often means that you marry outside your language group. And so there's multilingualism within the family. Your mother and your father and your grandmother and your grandfather might all speak different languages. And this idea that you would be confined to just one language would be completely bizarre and unusual. And as you mentioned, The Makassan traders. So they came from Sulawesi, from Indonesia. They'd been coming for hundreds of years across the top end, and they were multilingual as well. Their crews spoke sort of a Malay pidgin, but there was multiple languages on board these ships and they exchanged with Andequa people on Grid island, but Yolngu people, Tiwi people as well. And you can find words, you probably know this, you can find words from their languages in these Aboriginal languages. And the one that I talk about in my book is Jura, which is common across the Northern Territory. A word that means paper or book or writing comes from Arabic originally, but it's made its way into Aboriginal languages. So there's this really intense cross cultural exchange around the idea of language communication, writing books. So Aboriginal people were aware of this long before the colonizers came and had traditions of translating and interpreting, had norms about who would speak for whom people were esteemed as interpreters, and linguistic expertise were recognized and valued. But there's also sort of an embedded reciprocity and interdependence in when you have this inbuilt multilingualism in your community, when you become dependent on each other in a way that you might not, where you have a monolingual community, where people have particular language expertise and they're used to translating and interpreting, singing for different countries in ceremony that would require someone who's an expert in this or that language so they can sing the right song for that song line. It all requires this incredible linguistic expertise, which is seen as a strength. But for the English speakers, of course, all this is seen as a little bit messy and complicated and wouldn't it be much more efficient if everyone just spoke the one language? I think it was hard for the colonisers, for the missionaries, to see that this multilingualism might be a strength rather than an obstacle to overcome. And the Commonwealth government introduced a syllabus for Aboriginal schools in the 1950s. It was very explicitly about introducing English. And they did say, oh, there's so many languages. What are we going to do? It's too hard to learn all the languages. We just need one language. And that language should be English, because this is the language of Australian citizenship. Now I feel like I've rabbited on for quite a bit. Is there?
- [18:37]
B
No, no, please, please go on. This is very interesting.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I guess in the work I wanted to challenge the assumption that those who, people who don't primarily speak English as their first language or primary language were necessarily victims or vulnerable, that this Multilingualism was a real strength. And that the assertion that English should be a universal language and that we are stronger by all speaking the same language, that's a cultural assumption and it's ultimately an imperial assumption in this context as well.
- [19:14]
B
And this particular aspect of your work is particularly interesting for me and our team at Language on the Move because a lot of our research strongly focuses on the implications nations or contemporary multilingual or linguistically diverse communities in places like Australia, where English is, you know, remains the dominant language. English in Australia continues to relate to citizenship and speakers of other languages. They have different identities assigned to them depending on the language. Often very negative identities. Right. And there are high status languages and low status languages. There's all those things. And. And perhaps we sideline what other languages have to offer. We lose what could be meaningful exchanges. What can we learn from your work and what can readers take from this very insightful historical account to inform our research in contemporary Australia?
- [20:03]
A
Yeah, I guess it's what you were saying, that English doesn't need to be the only or the dominant language, that there is great strength and creativity and resources in being a multilingual community. And Australia historically has always been multilingual. You know, this English is not the language that is connected to this land. It's not the language of the country. It's the language that we, you know, it's the dominant language at the moment, but it's. It's not the language of country. And I wanted to recover that and recapture that. I also, as I said, I guess I wanted to challenge assumptions that those who don't speak English as their primary language are unnecessarily victims or vulnerable. That language can be a tool, it can be a weapon. There's a way that evading English can be a choice, an assertion, a reclaiming of identity, a form of resistance. I don't know, you would have seen in the book. I opened with this story about the first missionaries arriving on Groot island, and they wanted to translate the Sunday school song Jesus Loves Me. And so they approach the old man at the camp and this missionary says, jesus loves me. This I know. And he wants to know the word for me. And the way he tells it is that he pointed to his chest and said, me. How do you say me? And the old man gave him the word for chest hair. And so the missionary started singing, Jesus loves my chest hair. Now, the missionary, he told this story many times and he used it in his fundraising as kind of an amusing story about how these poor, ignorant Ignorant first nations people supposedly were so naive or gullible or silly that they didn't understand what he was getting at. And isn't it a great story? But the way that I read it and the way that I think makes sense, having met with the old people of this community and I brought this interpretation to them and said, oh, yes, this is probably what happened, is that the first nations community, the old people were playing a joke on the missionary. They used their language to set him up, to make a fool of themselves and to assert themselves as the knowledge holders anyway. So I guess this is a roundabout way of saying I want to recover the agency of groups that are outside the dominant language community and show how they've shaped Australian history as well and show how their languages have been a source of strength.
- [22:22]
B
Yes. And I did find that story very amusing as well. I'm so glad you began with that story. That's hilarious. And what a great way to understand what happened in that interaction, the way you described it. Tell us, what is next for you and your work. What other research projects are you working on now?
- [22:40]
A
Sure. Well, I'm continuing that work with the same community up on Green island, but also with some other Northern Territory communities on the Tiwi Islands and Gumbalanya and West Arnhem. And I'm looking at a broader project on first nations self determination. But I'm also, I guess I'm really interested in the history of Christianity and Aboriginal land. The ways that religion has been used to deny Aboriginal land and enable dispossession, but also the way that first nations people have drawn on their spiritual resources and spiritual claims to make claims to land as well. So I'm very much in the thick of religious thinking at the moment, but this work on translation is still very much on my mind and informing what I'm doing. The ways that concepts get translated across cultures and then can be turned back against the dominant culture. I'm really interested in the ways that first nations people have done that throughout history.
- [23:36]
B
And it's wonderful for us to have this knowledge of the history of languages in Australia. So thank you very much for your work, Laura, and we really look forward to reading more of it.
- [23:46]
A
Oh, thank you so much.
- [23:47]
B
It's been a pleasure and thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time.