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Christine Nicholls

The voices of this land

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December 2014, no. 367

A relatively unusual occurrence until recently, the publication of a plethora of new Australian Aboriginal-authored and/or Aboriginal-themed children’s books has begun transforming the Australian publishing landscape. A number of these books, like Rhoda Lalara and Alfred Lalara’s charmingly evocative Yirruwa Yirrilikenuma-langwa (When We Go Walkabout: Allen & Unwin, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9781743314562), are rendered bilingually, in the latter case in Anindilyakwa, the mother tongue of the majority of Groote Eylandt residents, as well as in English.

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Mamang   by Kim Scott, Iris Woods, and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project & Noongar Mambara Bakitj by Kim Scott, Lomas Roberts and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project

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February 2012, no. 338
Christine Nicholls reviews 'Mamang' by Kim Scott, Iris Woods, and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project and 'Noongar Mambara Bakitj' by Kim Scott, Lomas Roberts and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project

Mamang and Noongar Mambara Bakitj are retellings of traditional Noongar narratives by the Miles Franklin Award-winning author Kim Scott, in collaboration with a team of others. The books are part of a broader Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories reclamation and revitalisation project currently under way in the south-western coastal region of Western Australia, an area roughly traversing Albany to Esperance. Like many other Australian languages today, Noongar is barely hanging on. These modest diglot books, charmingly illustrated by Noongar people in simple, unaffected, and direct style, therefore represent a timely intervention into the continuing post-colonial destruction of this critically (and globally) endangered language.

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