George Augustus Robinson and the Documentation of Languages of South-Eastern New South Wales

Abstract

George Augustus Robinson, best known as the conciliator of Tasmanian Aborigines and Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District (Victoria), has provided major sources of documentation for languages of Victoria and surrounding areas. These have become accessible in recent years through the editing and publication of his journals and vocabulary lists by Ian Clark. This paper studies in particular his materials on the languages of south-eastern New South Wales, describing the documents and inferring from them his conception of language and his methods of data collection. Although Robinson provided mainly wordlists written in an idiosyncratic English-based orthography, it is possible, by interpreting the wordlists in the light of background information in the journals and by comparing vocabulary items across wordlists and with those of other sources on the same languages, to extract a surprising amount of useful material on a group of poorly described languages-which can be used for purposes of linguistic typology, historical-comparative reconstruction, and heritage language recovery by Indigenous communities.