This was the task Theresa Sainty faced when she, alongside others, started work to rediscover the language of Tasmanian Aboriginals. 

Palawa Kani is the contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal language, developed from the remaining fragments of the languages of Indigenous Tasmanians. 

The theme of this week’s NAIDOC celebrations is ‘Our Languages Matter’, something Mrs Sainty knows only too well. 

“Language comes from country, language is tied to our identity … I can see the pride in those young people when they're standing up there talking in their language, and some of the not-so-young people too, it’s pride in their identity and just another affirmation that we have survived and we have thrived,” she said. 

When, in the early 1990s, Mrs Sainty began working to develop Palawa Kani she realised she already spoke many Aboriginal words, without realising. 

Palawa Kani is developed from all the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages that once existed, not enough remained of any one to revive it as a single language.

Mrs Sainty and the language revival team relied heavily on records from european colonisers, audio recordings of Aboriginals, and the fragments of songs and individual words that remained alive in the community.  

A significant aspect of the work reviving the native languages of Tasmania was in developing a written system for what was an oral language. 

“Our original languages were not written down, they were oral languages, so we needed to work out how we were going to represent those sounds in our language and make it so we could write it down,” Mrs Sainty said. 

“There was a lot of work done in the early days looking at the ... sounds and how they were going to be represented and how we developed our alphabet.

“There are some sounds in our original languages that aren’t in English and so we needed to represent those.”

With the development of Palawa Kani and its widespread adoption and use, the language and words that echoed around the wilds of Tasmania long before white men stepped on the land will continue. 

“Our language was in danger of never being spoken again except for those few words or those few fragments of song,” Mrs Sainty said. 

“How fantastic is it that we can actually bring back into use words that haven’t been spoken since invasion and colonisation?”