Anzac, Race and Empire

In 2015, a new memorial was unveiled in Sydney’s Hyde Park, the formal green rectangle in the city’s centre. In a creative and vibrant city like Sydney, the launch of a new public artwork was not remarkable, but this event differed because it was a new war memorial, and even more unusually, it commemorated the military service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians. Designed by Indigenous artist Tony Albert, ...

Rethinking Australian Aboriginal English-based speech varieties

The colonial history of Australia necessitated contact between nineteenth and twentieth century dialects of English and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages. This has resulted in the emergence of contact languages, some of which have been identified as creoles (e.g. Sandefur 1979, Shnukal 1983) while others have been hidden under the label of ‘Aboriginal English’, exacerbated by what Young (1997) described as a gap in our knowledge of historical analyses of individual speech varieties. In this paper we provide detailed sociohistorical data on the emergence of a contact language in Woorabinda, an ex-Government Reserve in Queensland. We propose that the data shows that the label ‘Aboriginal English’ previously applied (Alexander 1968) does not accurately identify the language. Here we compare the sociohistorical data for Woorabinda to similar data for both Kriol, a creole spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia and to Bajan, an ‘intermediate creole’ of Barbados, to argue that the language spoken in Woorabinda is most likely also an intermediate creole.