Towards a Nhangga hermeneutic: breathing life into written archival materials

Abstract

This paper is concerned with issues arising from the translation of a dreaming story from English/Aboriginal English back into an extremely endangered Aboriginal language. The story of Bilarl (Sooty Bell Magpie) was recorded by Daisy Bates in the early years of the twentieth century during her time at Eucla (WA) or Fowlers Bay (SA). The story was uncovered in the Daisy Bates Collection as the Barr Smith Library and was translated by a group of Wirangu people (Nhanggas) and the author at Ceduna (SA) in 2011. The translation process, the first attempted for the Wirangu language, revealed a number of surprises relating to what I call a Nhangga hermeneutic. That is, the way that Wirangu people perform the task of translating into their heritage language reflects local ways of making meaning that differ substantially from methods informed by normative literacy practices. In outlining this hermeneutic, this paper explores the processes of liberating oral narratives from written documents.