Preservation projects in Queensland

Aurukun Shire Council’s language program brings together Elders and community members to collaborate with staff from the Indigenous Knowledge Centre, Koolkan Aurukun State School and Council. The co-designed, community-led program also provides training and employment opportunities to support participants to teach, learn, celebrate and preserve their languages in a culturally-safe environment.

Building on the Wik-Mungkan language program established in 2018 at the school, the 2020 Indigenous Languages Grant supported the development of new resources for older primary students and incorporated additional languages for the first time, reflecting the language diversity of the Aurukun community and wider Wik region. Wik-Mungkan, Wik-Ngathan, Wik-Alken/Wik-Ngatharr and Kugu language varieties would be revived through integrated teaching and learning resources for use on Country, and in school and community settings.

The languages grant contributed to five important outcomes for the Aurukun community:

• filming and recordings of people speaking in language, including Elders sharing stories for younger generations and translations of Welcome to Country that highlighted the connections to other communities and languages in the wider region, including Coen and Pormpuraaw
• leadership training for Wik-Mungkan and Wik-Alken Elders and teachers through a First Nations Language teaching workshop in Cairns, where they shared language and cultural knowledge to create resources for the school and Aurukun community
• language celebration at the school’s annual community event where Elders and teachers were acknowledged and students’ achievements shared, including songs performed in Wik-Mungkan
• research, revival and documentation of languages and Elders’ cultural knowledge in keeping with their emphasis on the importance of keeping all languages strong in the community, including the creation of new learning resources, recordings of previously published stories in language, and materials to complement the ongoing work of the Woyan Min biocultural project
• employment and mentoring opportunities in a variety of roles across different language communities, including the cultural and language expertise of Elders, interpreters, language teachers, students and young people, translators, community linguists, dancers and artists.

The Wik-Mungkan language is considered one of the strongest living languages in Queensland and the expansion of the revival program to include the other language varieties of the region will only build on the community’s success.

You can find out more about the Wik language group in this Stories video from the State Library of Queensland’s exhibition Spoken: celebrating Queensland languages.

The Murgon State School P&C Association in partnership with local Elders, artists and traditional language speakers have been working to place the Wakka Wakka language at the heart of the school.

Their 2020 Indigenous Languages Grant helped transform the school grounds, establishing the Bari Waa Binar (meaning small, shared meeting space) garden and outdoor learning space, as well as stunning murals with interactive language lessons. The project engaged students from playgroup through to Year 6, to celebrate the Wakka Wakka language and culture while demonstrating how an inclusive learning environment can benefit the whole community.

The P&C Association’s goal was to create a beautiful place for students and school community members to meet, yarn, share language and cultural knowledge. By consulting with Wakka Wakka language speakers from Eidsvold, the Murgon State School Language Advisory Group and local Elders from Cherbourg and Murgon, they looked to build a place where all gather as equals, to build safe, respectful relationships — a place to be enjoyed by all Murgon State School students and staff, as well as parents and local community members.

The space was welcomed by the school community as well as local Elders and traditional language speakers for events including a Planting Day in conjunction with the Barambah Environmental Education Centre and Bunya Rangers, behaviour discussions for students in line with traditional Wakka Wakka ways, storytelling, corroboree and traditional dance practice.

Behind the scenes, the P&C has also helped establish the formal Murgon State School Language Advisory Group and Language Agreement and supported professional development for teachers in partnership with Eidsvold State School.

Just as the plants around the Bari Waa Binar grow strong, the community commitment to revitalising the Wakka Wakka language continues to thrive in Murgon.

The Pama Language Centre works to ensure the 55 language groups across the Cape York Peninsular are living languages that are growing with their people. They seek to use the tools of the current time to preserve the culture of their ancestors. Established in 2015, the centre has been working on numerous projects and benefits from a vast group of language champions who are experts in the language groups and dialects of the region.

The Pama Language Centre’s 2020 Indigenous Languages Grant supported the pilot of an ambitious new project, In our words – history in ancestral languages, a scalable, multi-voiced history resource in the language of the land. Initially focusing on Guugu Yimithirr, this pilot would develop a collaborative model for language revitalisation that could be applied not only by the Pama Language Centre but made available to any language champions or centres across Australia. The project team sought to create a development model including step-by-step protocols and templates, as well as produce comprehensive print and interactive digital Guugu Yimithirr resources.

Unfortunately, the pandemic prevented the centre from engaging directly with the Guugu Yimithirr community to conduct in-person consultation sessions at the time. So they instead focused more closely on the web-based aspect of the project and the creation of their new online platform for presenting ancestral history content. The next phase of the project will be for the team’s linguists, historians and creatives to finally visit communities such as Hope Vale to record oral histories with Elders and further develop the historical sections of the teaching resources, including videos and illustrations.

As well as exploring the first phase of the In our words project on the Pama Language Centre website, you can also visit the Pama Centre YouTube channel to experience songs, stories, language lessons and workshops from the Cape York Peninsular.