#kaurna

And the way to say hello is “niina marni!” To which the answer is “marni ai”

Now this means “are you good?” But it also can mean “are you fat?” Or “are you full/well fed”

And I love that. To be full and content. To be happy. All the same.

Bee 1: Niina marni? (Are you good ?)

Bee 2: Marni'ai (I'm good)

Bee 1: Wanti niina (Where are you going?)

Bee 2: Wardli-ana (Going home)

“I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains

Of ragged mountain ranges

Of droughts and flooding rains”

I’m reminded of those words as I stand here on Kaurna country; hard earth beneath my feet and hot wind sweeping across my face. 

It’s this feeling that tells me that I’m home. 

Kaurna land is truly beautiful. The city is almost entirely encompassed by vast bushland that expands from the York Peninsula (Guuranda) nearly up to Port Augusta (Goordnada) and all the way back down to Cape Jervis (Parewarangk). To the West of Adelaide, we have the open water that is St Vincent’s Gulf (Wongajerla) and out to the Indian Ocean.

This may not be the place of my ancestors, but it was the place that I came into the world and spent my early years and childhood. 

I sit here and ponder that.

I ponder the deep spiritual connection I feel to this land and for the first time really consider what it means to be on Aboriginal Land. I think to myself, if this is the connection that I feel to country, how much stronger is it for First Nations Peoples. One hundred, one thousand, sixty thousand, four hundred thousand times stronger perhaps? And the weight of that really hit me. 

This moment was brought on by the Bachelorette and Brooke’s friend asking the final two if they know what country they live and work on. I felt smug about it at the time. Yes of course, I know the original custodians of where I live and work (The Gadigal/Cammeraygal People of the Eora Nation). 

But I was considering why I know that. 

I was still in school when Welcome/Acknowledgement of Country first came to be following Kevin Rudd’s official apology to First Nations Peoples. Every school assembly I would be reminded that I was on Kaura land. This continued into my university years. When I moved to Sydney and started tutoring in the middle of COVID, I had to look up whose land I was on as my classes were online so this information couldn’t be provided in the slides as it would be different for everyone. So in sum, I know because I’ve had to know, not because I did this on my own accord and all of sudden I felt ashamed by that. 

No my ancestors weren’t responsible for the atrocities whereby Australia came to be (my family migrated to Australia in the 1950s from an impoverished warn-torn Italy). But even if my ancestry was Ango-Saxon, who was responsible to me, is missing the point. What can we all do now to preserve and celebrate Aboriginal (and Torres Strait Islander) culture and I don’t think I am doing enough. 

I want to be a part of the conversation and I want to involve myself. Restoring the rights of First Nations peoples are and should be every Australians responsibility. 

So I’m here for it, I’m open and I’m willing to learn. I acknowledge that I cannot drive this, that should come from First Nations and only First Nations Peoples. But I will be an ally and I will do everything I can. 

Protests coming up in Adelaide! Stop black deaths in custody.

They are currently planing on using the SRS on tomorrow’s (4/July/2020) Black Lives Matter rally.

To celebrate International Year of Indigenous Languages, the Royal Australian Mint launched the new coins.

Money, or an object which abstractly represented the value of goods and services, did not exist in Australia before European colonisation. Trade occurred, but it was between items deemed to be of similar worth, for example, pearl shell, quartz, food or songs. With the entry of money into the Indigenous economy, new words were needed to refer to coins and later, notes.

Most Indigenous words for money come from words for “stone”, “rock” or “pebble”, no doubt in reference to the size and shape of coins. On the new 50 cent coin, you’ll find words for “stone” from across Australia: 

An article by Claire Bowern in The Conversation about how the Pama-Nyungan languages spread and changed through Australia. Excerpt:

The approximately 400 languages of Aboriginal Australia can be grouped into 27 different families. To put that diversity in context, Europe has just four language families, Indo-European, Basque, Finno-Ugric and Semitic, with Indo-European encompassing such languages as English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi.

Australia’s largest language family is Pama-Nyungan. Before 1788 it covered 90% of the country and comprised about 300 languages. The territories on which Canberra (Ngunnawal), Perth (Noongar), Sydney (Daruk, Iyora), Brisbane (Turubal) and Melbourne (Woiwurrung) are built were all once owned by speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages.

All the languages from the Torres Strait to Bunbury, from the Pilbara to the Grampians, are descended from a single ancestor language that spread across the continent to all but the Kimberley and the Top End. 

Where this language came from, how old it is, and how it spread, has been something of a puzzle. Our research, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, suggests the family arose just under 6,000 years ago around what is now the Queensland town of Burketown. Our findings suggest this language family spread across Australia as people moved in response to changing climate. [...]

Because our models make estimates of the time that it takes for words to change, as well as how words in Pama-Nyungan languages are related to one another, we can use those changes to estimate the age of the family. [...]

We found that, in our model, groups of people moved more slowly near the coast and major waterways, and faster across deserts. This implies that populations increase where food and water are plentiful, and then spread out and fissure when resources are harder to obtain.

You can see a simulated expansion here. The spread of Pama-Nyungan languages mirrored this spread of people.

What languages tell us

Languages today tell us a lot about our past. Because languages change regularly, we can use information in them to work out who groups were talking to in the past, where they lived, who they are related to, and where they’ve moved. We can do this even in the absence of a written record and of archaeological materials.

For places like Australia, the linguistic record, though incomplete, has more even coverage across the continent than the archaeological record does. At European settlement, there were about 300 Pama-Nyungan languages. Because there are at least some records of most of them we are able to work with these to uncover these complex patterns of change.

There are approximately 145 Aboriginal languages with speakers today, including languages from outside the Pama-Nyungan family. Many of these languages, such as Dieri, Ngalia and Mangala, are spoken by only a few people, many of whom are elderly.

Other languages, however, are actively used in their communities and are learned as first languages by young children. These include the Yolŋu languages of Arnhem Land and Arrernte in Central Australia. Yet others (such as Kaurna around Adelaide) are undergoing a renaissance, gaining speakers within their communities.