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Our journey with blood begins with Australia’s first nations people by exploring the word for blood in over 150 different Aboriginal languages. Australia is one of the most language diverse continents in the world, yet many of these languages are at risk of disappearing. Researchers at The University of Melbourne are preserving this cultural heritage through a digital archive of language groups.
Photograph - Blood droplet, Science Gallery Melbourne
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© Copyright of Science Gallery Melbourne
Film - Semiconductor Media, 'Blood', 2017, Science Gallery Melbourne
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Muluurr]
[Wulkirrim]
[Padawur]
[Ganbi]
Associate Professor Rachel Nordlinger
Director, Research Unit for Indigneous Language, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
From a linguist perspective, there's about 300 distinct indigenous languages across Australia. From an indigenous perspective, it's more like 700 different languages. And the reason there's a difference there is that linguists apply very strict definition in distinguishing a language from a dialect. So even if we apply very, very strict linguistic definitions, we still end up with about 300 distinct languages spoken across the country.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker
Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation
It's very important to preserve aboriginal languages, as far as I'm concerned. But part of that preservation process is very complex, when you have very few speakers left of a language. So, it's important that we have linguists that can come along and write aboriginal languages down, record them, so that you can see and hear how they're spoken. And, but also, not only recording the words and dictionaries, but also recording the language in the context of which it is spoken. As aboriginal people have an oral history with no written language, much of the language is recorded on cassette tapes, VHS tapes, MiniDV tapes, all sorts of old magnetic formats from when linguists first started recording aboriginal languages.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Nungu]
[Labulbul]
[Karndobarra]
[Ngulya]
Dr Nick Thieberger
ARC Future Fellow, School of Languages and Linguistics
Of course, we can't archive entire languages. What we're doing here is archiving whatever snippets of languages have been recorded. Sometimes that's quite detailed information. Other times it may only be a couple of sentences. But it's very important to preserve all of this, if we can.
New technologies are letting us do all kinds of interesting new things with these heritage recordings. So obviously digitizing, putting them into an archive, making them available on the internet is something we couldn't do in the past with analogue recordings, where you have to go to a particular place to listen to it. But it's also quite difficult to find things through catalogues, if you're not particularly interested in looking through a catalogue. So we've been exploring using virtual reality as a way of presenting some of the audio material that we have in the collection.
And what we've done there is taken snippets of audio—20 second snippets—and put them into a virtual reality display. And that allows you to visualize these countries with shards of light coming up from the ground. Each of those shards of light represents a language. And as you travel over this landscape in your virtual reality experience, you hear these 20 second snippets of language. So, you're walking through, traveling through a forest of languages, hearing these voices as you go through.
And if you focus on a particular one, then you can hear that one separately from the forest. And so, this is a way we're exploring of displaying this information. And ultimately what we'd like to do with this is use that as a point of entry, so that once you get to language that you're interested in or you hear a voice that you recognize, you should be able to go back to the collection and have more of that information played to you.
Associate Professor Rachel Nordlinger
Director, Research Unit for Indigneous Language, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
People were often very emotional for a number of reasons. Firstly, for a lot of people, they were hearing their fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers who had passed away. And they were hearing their voices again. And that was very emotional for obvious reasons. And for a lot of people, they were hearing languages that they remembered from their childhood, but that they haven't heard spoken for maybe 20 years.
And this is in a context where there isn't really anyone who speaks these languages anymore. So, that's very emotional to hear these languages being spoken again on their own recordings.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Kalk]
[Garrngan]
[Kun-kurlba]
[Mulubin]
[Ilirri]
[Yalyu]
[Kirrae]
[Maningan]
[Kumulung]
[Mangguh]
[Kurratj]
[Mo-bornkoh]
Can you reuse this media without permission? No (with exceptions, see below)
All rights reserved
This media item is licensed under "All rights reserved". You cannot share (i.e. copy, distribute, transmit) or rework (i.e. alter, transform, build upon) this item, or use it for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. However, an exception can be made if your intended use meets the "fair dealing" criteria. Uses that meet this criteria include research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; enabling a person with a disability to access material; or professional advice by a lawyer, patent attorney, or trademark attorney.
Please acknowledge the item’s source, creator and title (where known)
© Copyright of Science Gallery Melbourne
Filmed, produced and directed by Andrew Watson (Semiconductor Media) for Creative Victoria and Science Gallery Melbourne. Interviews by Alicia Sometimes and Ingrid Knarston.
Gurrk means blood in the Woi wurrung language of the Wurundjeri people, the traditional custodians of the land that is now part of Melbourne.
The original inhabitants of Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, belonged to over 700 different nations. These groups spoke hundreds of different languages, making Australia one of the most linguistically diverse places on Earth. Fewer than 150 of these languages remain in regular use and all but a few are now considered endangered.
Blood features Associate Professor Rachel Nordlinger, Director, Research Unit for Indigneous Language, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language; Dr Nick Thieberger, ARC Future Fellow, School of Languages and Linguistics and Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker, Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation.
Map - David Hobson, Damien Evans and Andrew Wilson (creators), 'Tindale Map', 1974, Science Gallery Melbourne
Can you reuse this media without permission? No (with exceptions, see below)
All rights reserved
This media item is licensed under "All rights reserved". You cannot share (i.e. copy, distribute, transmit) or rework (i.e. alter, transform, build upon) this item, or use it for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. However, an exception can be made if your intended use meets the "fair dealing" criteria. Uses that meet this criteria include research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; enabling a person with a disability to access material; or professional advice by a lawyer, patent attorney, or trademark attorney.
Please acknowledge the item’s source, creator and title (where known)
© Copyright of David Hobson, Damien Evans and Andrew Wilson
Image courtesy of David Hobson, Damien Evans and Andrew Wilson
Originally produced by Norman Tindale in 1974, the Tindale Map is an attempt to represent the languages of the Aboriginal people of Australia.
The interactive version produced as part of the Blood pop-up exhibition allowed visitors to explore the vast array of languages through one word, blood. The memetics (evolutionary transfer of cultural information) of human language can be visualised across Australia.
Victorian Collections acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work.
