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NLA News - home February 2004 Volume XIV Number 5
Words Are Clues
A hand-col. lithograph of 'The City and Harbour of Sidney from Near Vaucluse' in 1852 by Thomas Shotter Boys
Thomas Shotter Boys (1803–1874)
The City and Harbour of Sidney from Near Vaucluse 1852
hand-col. lithograph; 38.5 x 57.7 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an7404319

From the very beginning of European settlement on Australia’s east coast, Indigenous words were recorded by navy personnel, administrators and residents. Keith Vincent Smith unearths some of the resulting word lists in the Library’s collections

A pastel drawing of a 'Portrait of Surgeon William Brougham Monkhouse' c.1768
[Portrait of Surgeon William Brougham Monkhouse] [c.1768]
pastel drawing; oval image
24.2 x 19.7 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an11554609

Fifty-eight out of 60. It was a good afternoon in the Manuscript Reading Room at the National Library.

Sifting carefully through century-old field notebooks in the unpublished Papers of R.H. Mathews (MS8006), I found what I was looking for. The word mibberi=eye, collected by the anthropologist from Aboriginal informants in 1901, had survived in the Sydney area with the same meaning it had in 1770, when Surgeon William Monkhouse had written meebere.

I had previously matched 57 of 60 Indigenous words collected by three crew members of Lieutenant James Cook’s discovery ship HMS Endeavour at Botany Bay with words recorded by members of the First Fleet at Port Jackson (Sydney). The remaining two words are still elusive.

The words were written down by Monkhouse, Isaac Smith, the young cousin of Cook’s wife Elizabeth, and Second Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, the first person on board to sight the Australian mainland. Twenty years would pass before words like moola (mulla)=man, din (dyin)= woman, daara (dara)=teeth, dingoo (dangu)=dog, paduo (badu)=water, peemal (bimal)=earth and gooyong (gwiang)=fire would be heard from the mouths of Indigenous informants at Port Jackson.

Consequently, I was able to claim in ‘1770: The Endeavour Lists—Forgotten Words from Botany Bay’ in the January–February 2003 issue of AQ Journal of Contemporary Analysis, that these were the first Indigenous words collected in Australia and that their existence contradicts the accepted historical account that there were no friendly meetings between the Aboriginal people and Cook’s voyagers.

An engraving of 'A Family of New South Wales' in  1792 by William Blake
William Blake (1757–1827)
A Family of New South Wales 1792
engraving; 20.9 x 6.4 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an7691834

The Endeavour word lists, collected by William Lanyon, who sailed on Cook’s second and third voyages, were published in London in 1979 by his descendant, linguist Dr Peter Lanyon-Orgill (1924–2002), in Captain Cook’s South Sea Vocabularies.

Later, in the Library’s general stacks, I located a rare work, Bibliotheca Marsdeniana, by William Marsden (1754–1836), printed in London in 1827. On page 302, under the heading  ‘AUSTRALASIAN of NEW HOLLAND, &c.’ were listed three vocabularies of the ‘language of N.S. Wales in the neighbourhood of Sydney’.

Two of these are language notebooks compiled by Marine Lieutenant William Dawes and the third is a semi-official vocabulary that, as linguist Jakelin Troy has argued convincingly, was kept by Governor Arthur Phillip, his secretary David Collins and Captain John Hunter of HMS Sirius.

At his death, Marsden bequeathed a large library, including the unpublished manuscripts, to the newly formed King’s College, London. In September 1920, the three notebooks were transferred to the Library of the William Marsden Collection of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.

Marsden, a linguist, historian, naturalist, antiquarian, coin collector and Fellow of the Royal Society in good standing with its president Sir Joseph Banks, had been stationed in Sumatra with the East India Company as a young man and later published A Dictionary of the Malay Language (1812). He was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty in 1795 and was First Secretary (Samuel Pepys’s old job) from 1804–07.

A watercolour of [Aborigines Spearing Fish…] c.1817 by Joseph Lycett
Joseph Lycett (c.1775–1828)
[Aborigines Spearing Fish…] c.1817
watercolour; 17.7 x 28.0 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an2962915

Australian linguists first became aware of the existence of these First Fleet vocabularies in 1972, when they were arranged and edited by Phyllis Mander-Jones in a publication, co-sponsored by the National Library of Australia and the Australian National University, entitled Manuscripts in the British Isles Relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Nobody, to my knowledge, had correctly traced the provenance of these works. On a whim, I looked through the NLA catalogue and found a small volume, A Brief Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Marsden ... (London: J.L. Cox & Sons, 1838), in which Marsden boasted in a letter written on 16 December 1790:

I receive many a present from my friends. Sir Joseph [Banks] considers me as the depository of every thing respecting language that comes to his hands, and when a ship arrives from a discovery voyage, the vocabularies are delivered as equally to me, as the Journals to the Admiralty. By Lieutenant King, who is just come from Botany Bay, we have the first specimens that have been procured of the language of the natives.

I knew that on his return to Sydney Cove from Norfolk Island, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King had written into his journal for 9 April 1790 ‘a very correct Vocabulary [which] I got from Mr Collins and Governor Phillip, both having been very assiduous in getting words for it, which they compare’. King copied out 160 words that were the basis for the 300-word vocabulary printed in John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island ... (London: John Stockdale, 1793).

An oil painting of the 'Entrance to Port Jackson' c.1852 by a unknown painter
Unknown painter
Entrance to Port Jackson c.1852
oil painting; 41.8 x 57.9 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an2260896

King left Sydney on 17 April 1790 for Batavia (Jakarta) on HMS Supply with despatches from Governor Phillip seeking food supplies for the convict colony of New South Wales, which was in danger of starvation. He did not reach England until December 1790. After King visited Banks at Soho Square, London, his vocabulary, as we have seen, was soon in the hands of William Marsden.

The majority of words and phrases in Phillip’s vocabulary had been gleaned from Woollarawarre Bennelong (c.1764–1813) over five months of captivity in 1789–90 and during daily visits to the governor after October 1790. Bennelong, a Wangal from the south shore of the Parramatta River, supplied a word list to shipbuilder Daniel Paine, probably as they were returning from England to Sydney in 1795 as supernumeraries aboard HMS Reliance.

Bennelong was also credited as the informant of a Sydney vocabulary in the possession of Archibald Meston in 1896, but now missing. Meston, protector of Aborigines for southern Queensland, wrote in The Bulletin (Sydney) on 18 April 1896:

The most interesting vocabulary in my possession is one taken down from the lips of Bennelong, one of the two Sydney blacks, who went to England with Governor Phillip in 1792. Attached to this is another taken from a George’s River Black named Walwarra, in 1803 by Thomas Jarrett Ives, who lived with the blacks and spoke their language. Both vocabularies were printed at the ‘Sydney Gazette’ office in 1809.

An engraving print  of 'Captain John Hunter' in  1792 by Daniel Orme
Daniel Orme (c.1766–1802)
Captain John Hunter 1792
engraving print; oval image
26.4 20.1 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an9631633

When Meston’s son reprinted this text in 1924, he deleted the words ‘in my possession’. In later articles and correspondence, Meston gave differing dates for the printing of the vocabularies: 1810, 1812 and 1814. He referred not to Thomas Jarret Ives, but to ‘James Ives, who had arrived in Sydney in 1800’, lived among the Aborigines and spoke their language fluently. I was unable to find either a printed or written copy of these elusive vocabularies, despite a two-day search of three boxes of Meston’s Papers in the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

Searching the National Library of Australia catalogue on the Internet, I noted a manuscript letter written by Meston from Brisbane on 7 July 1916, replying to one sent on 23 June 1916 by the eminent bibliographer J.A. Ferguson (MS3303). This time there was no mention of Bennelong as an informant. Meston wrote:

You evidently refer to the small word [list] written by James Ives & published in 1814, at the ‘Sydney Gazette’ office, a work of 36 pages entitled ‘Language and some customs of the Botany Bay Black Natives,’ a Copy of which was given to me there by an old ex convict who told me there had been only ten copies printed & that I would have no chance of [ever seeing] another.

Is there another copy? And where?

Mine will be incorporated Verbatim in my forthcoming work on the Australian Aboriginals to be published—I hope—in the next two years.

An oil on canvas painting of 'The Bark, Earl of Pembroke, Later Endeavour, Leavig Whitby Harbour in 1768' [c.1790] by Thomas Luny
Thomas Luny (1759–1837)
The Bark, Earl of Pembroke, Later Endeavour, Leavig Whitby Harbour in 1768 [c.1790]
oil on canvas; 79.1 x 145.1 cm
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an2280897

While Meston’s letter contained more information, it was a frustrating lead. There is no record of the original letter from Ferguson, who did not list the Ives leaflets in his great bibliography. Further, Meston’s proposed book on the Australian Aborigines was never published, although he might have included the vocabulary in the manuscript he sent to the Melbourne publisher George Robertson & Co. I have been unable to trace it.

Meston told Ferguson that the Ives pamphlet was remarkable. ‘Ives was evidently an educated man & fortunately spells all his words phonetically. He was Ten years among the blacks. Only two pages are indecipherable. It is printed on very rough paper.’

There was indeed a shortage of printing paper in Sydney in the period 1809–14, when inferior paper stock was imported from China. Some issues of the Sydney Gazette were cancelled and others printed on ragged, coloured paper.

I am not a linguist, but I use Indigenous words and placenames as historical evidence for my Master of Arts thesis on the Sydney coastal clans in the Indigenous Studies Department at Macquarie University, Sydney. I now have 11 Indigenous word lists and longer vocabularies, sufficient evidence, I believe, to prove that in 1788 one single language was spoken throughout the area that is now Sydney—from the Georges River in the south, to Pittwater in the north, and west to Parramatta. The two missing vocabularies that once belonged to the mysterious Ives would further validate this conclusion.

Such are the small victories of a scholar to whom words are vital clues to the puzzling jigsaw of Indigenous social structure and what really happened in Australia’s early history.

KEITH VINCENT SMITH is an historian and author of King Bungaree (Kangaroo Press, 1992) and Bennelong (Kangaroo Press, 2001)

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