The work of the German missionaries on South Australian languages in the first half of the nineteenth century has few contemporary parallels for thoroughness and clarity. This commentary on the grammatical introduction to Pastor Clamor Schürmann’s Vocabulary of the Parnkalla language of 1844 reconstructs a significant amount of Barngarla morphology, phonology and syntax.

Fragile Settlements compares the processes by which colonial authority was asserted over Indigenous people in south-west Australia and prairie Canada from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. At the start of this period, there was an explosion of settler migration across the British Empire. In a humanitarian response to the unprecedented demand for land, Britain’s Colonial Office moved to protect Indigenous peoples by making them subjects under British law. This book highlights the parallels and divergences between these connected British frontiers by examining how colonial actors and institutions interpreted and applied the principle of law in their interaction with Indigenous peoples on the ground. Fragile Settlements questions the finality of settler colonization and contributes to ongoing debates around jurisdiction, sovereignty, and the prospect of genuine Indigenous-settler reconciliation in Canada and Australia.

This book tells the story of the renaissance of the Kaurna language, the language of Adelaide and the Adelaide Plains in South Australia, principally over the earliest period up until 2000, but with a summary and brief discussion of developments from 2000 until 2016. It chronicles and analyses the efforts of the Nunga community, and interested others, to reclaim and relearn a linguistic heritage on the basis of mid-nineteenth-century materials. This study is breaking new ground. In the Kaurna case, very little knowledge of the language remained within the Aboriginal community. Yet the Kaurna language has become an important marker of identity and a means by which Kaurna people can further the struggle for recognition, reconciliation and liberation. This work challenges widely held beliefs as to what is possible in language revival and questions notions about the very nature of language and its development.

The contribution of German ethnography to Australian anthropological scholarship on Aboriginal societies and cultures has been limited, primarily because few people working in the field read German. But it has also been neglected because its humanistic concerns with language, religion and mythology contrasted with the mainstream British social anthropological tradition that prevailed in Australia until the late 1960s. The advent of native title claims, which require drawing on the earliest ethnography for any area, together with an increase in research on rock art of the Kimberley region, has stimulated interest in this German ethnography, as have some recent book translations. Even so, several major bodies of ethnography, such as the 13 volumes on the cultures of northeastern South Australia and the seven volumes on the Aranda of the Alice Springs region, remain inaccessible, along with many ethnographically rich articles and reports in mission archives. In 18 chapters, this book introduces and reviews the significance of this neglected work, much of it by missionaries who first wrote on Australian Aboriginal cultures in the 1840s. Almost all of these German speakers, in particular the missionaries, learnt an Aboriginal language in order to be able to document religious beliefs, mythology and songs as a first step to conversion. As a result, they produced an enormously valuable body of work that will greatly enrich regional ethnographies.

A history of Aboriginal South Australia in a collection of essays by both indigenous and white writers and historians.

Adnyamathanha is one of the Thura-Yura languages, spoken in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. It has a rather large inventory of consonant sounds, the analysis of which presents some challenges. We show that, in the most recently spoken variety of the language, there is a contrast between two series of obstruents, phonetically voiced and voiceless, in intervocalic position. There are also four phonetically distinct rhotic sounds, two of which we analyze as major allophones of the voiced apical stops. We also analyze a full series of contrastive pre-stopped nasals and a full series of contrastive pre-stopped laterals and we give reasons for preferring this analysis over one of stop + sonorant clusters. We show that there are three contrasting vowel qualities in Adnyamathanha, with no clear evidence to support a fourth, open-front unrounded phoneme. Apparently-contrastive long vowels can almost all be analyzed as V+V sequences separated either by glides or morpheme boundaries. The phonetically long vowels resulting from the latter case do not appear to be stressed, although the increased duration may give this impression to English ears. We conclude, however, that a 'once-a-phoneme-always-a-phoneme' approach does not provide a satisfactory account of Adnyamathanha phonology. It is more helpful to recognise that, between the robust phonemic contrasts and the clearly marginal sounds, there may be a 'cline of contrast' with a number of intermediate phonological relationships.

Work of Clamor Schurmann from Dresden Missionary Society around Adelaide and Port Lincoln areas 1838-1858; biographical information and personal names re local Aboriginal people; work as Deputy Protector of Aborigines; work on dictionary of native vocabulary; establishment of school for native children which was later absorbed into Poonindie Mission; attempts to intervene in massacres and other indiscriminate killing of Aboriginal people in retaliation for killing of whites and theft of food; Police Commissioner, Major OHalloran given authority to try, sentence and execute Aboriginal people by Governor Gawler; body ornamentation; weapons and utensils especially skin; food and hunting and gathering techniques; marriage and treatment of women; traditional medicine; initiation rites; sorcery and afterdeath beliefs; fighting; mortuary practices; bullroarers; encounters with Nawo, Ngadjun and Ngaiawang people.

Inherent in colonialism was the idea of self-legitimation, the most powerful tool of which was the colonizer's claim to bring the fruits of progress and modernity to the subject people. In colonial logic, people who were different because they were inferior had to be made similar - and hence equal - by civilizing them. However, once this equality had been attained, the very basis for colonial rule would vanish. Colonialism as Civilizing Mission explores British colonial ideology at work in South Asia. Ranging from studies on sport and national education, to pulp fiction to infanticide, to psychiatric therapy and religion, these essays on the various forms, expressions and consequences of the British 'civilizing mission' in South Asia shed light on a topic that even today continues to be an important factor in South Asian politics.

In this book, Ghil'ad Zuckermann introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration. Applying lessons from the Hebrew revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary endangered languages, Zuckermann takes readers along a fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival and provides new insights into language genesis. Beginning with a critical analysis of Israeli-the language resulting from the Hebrew revival-Zuckermann's radical theory contradicts conventional accounts of the Hebrew revival and challenges the family tree model of historical linguistics. Revivalistics demonstrates how grammatical cross-fertilization with the revivalists' mother tongues is inevitable in the case of successful "revival languages." The second part of the book then applies these lessons from the Israeli language to revival movements in Australia and globally, describing the "why" and "how" of revivalistics. With examples from the Barngarla Aboriginal language of South Australia, Zuckermann proposes ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian reasons for language revival and offers practical methods for reviving languages. Based on years of the author's research, fieldwork, and personal experience with language revivals all over the globe, Revivalistics offers ground-breaking theoretical and pragmatic contributions to the field of language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration.