Learning from Each Other: Language, Authority and Authenticity in Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant | Lynette Russell

Summary: Writers and their world | Lynette Russell Over the past few years I have, on and off, tried to learn a few sentences in the language of my Aboriginal ancestors. My guides through this have been linguists and language experts who have spent literally decades trying to recreate and reinvigorate a language that was virtually extinct. Their guides have been the word books, notes, journals and musings of early travelers, missionaries and ethnographers. Learning an Aboriginal language is a difficult, very difficult, task. My tongue seems to not understand where it should rest in my mouth; behind my lower teeth, in my palate or along the edge of my bite? As I have struggled with words that seem a strange yet wonderful collection of vowel sounds linked to unexpected consonants (clicking Gs and soft Ds) I marvel at the complexity and beauty of this language I desire to know. And I lament my own inability to do justice to a lexicon that sounds so lyrical that I feel I should attempt to sing it rather than merely struggle to speak it. Kate Grenville in her novel The Lieutenant, subsequent to if not sequel to the Secret River, has also consulted the word books and journals as her main character Lt. Rooke struggles to learn the language of the Gadigal mediated through his friendship with a young girl called Tagaran. Rooke is based on William Dawes, naval officer, astronomer and scientist who set up camp just on the fringe of the embryonic settlement where he was to observe the southern skies and map the constellations. Here Dawes met and befriended Patyegarang a young girl he compared to his beloved sister Anne. Patyegarang and Dawes taught each other their respective languages. I have a strong sense of identification with the characters in this book, I delight in its detail, the use of Gadigal language. I enjoy the sense of experimentation as Lt Rooke tries to pronounce words that his tongue (like mine) finds foreign. Rooke’s methodical and scientific mind is familiar, I recognise his need to find logic with in the chaos of the cosmos. I understand how he then applies this to mapping the language. I marvel at Tagaran’s playfulness, her confidence and her intellect, her certainty as someone who is firmly ‘at home’ in her ‘country’. In this seminar I want to explore the role of language in mediating the friendship between Rooke and Tagaran and how this might stand as an allegory for the relationships between Black and White Australia more generally. For the most part settler Australians have not endeavoured to learn or use Aboriginal languages apart from lyrical sounding place names, the meaning of which are often forgotten. Rooke’s desire to know the Other’s language suggests to me an engagement that is not easily categorised as simply colonialist. Importantly within this relationship there is (however momentarily or fleeting) equality. These are stories that belong to both Indigenous and settler Australians and the telling and retelling ought be seen as an exercise in reconciliation. Stories we all have a stake in.