The first aboriginal intermediaries: Interpreting and interpreted

Abstract

The challenges of interlinguistic and crosscultural communication at their extreme are epitomized in the initial contacts between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians. After sketching the linguistic encounters of the Australian continent’s original inhabitants with Asians and pre-settlement European explorers, this paper focuses on the circumstances, role and representations of the first identifiable Aboriginal interpreters — man, woman, child — in the early years of the colony. How do contact narratives represent interpreting and how might these fragmentary records — and their gaps and distortions — be interpreted through a close reading? Were the Aboriginal interpreters able to retake some of their lost agency by appropriating the colonizer’s language to their own purposes or manipulating the interpreting situations? Were they successful in bridging worlds, and how were they viewed by the two sides between which they mediated? This paper foregrounds these marginal figures who were nevertheless key linguistic and cultural mediators when the Indigenous oral societies grounded in a cosmology known as the Dreaming first encountered a society dominated by the English language and written forms and rooted in an alien worldview.