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We Make'im Amurdak
We Make'im Amurdak
In 1991 Nick Evans, now head of Linguistics in the School of History, Culture and Language at ANU sat down with the late Bill Neidjie to record an oral invitation for one of Nick’s students to travel 4000km from Melbourne, Victoria to remote Northwestern Arnhem Land in order to spend time with Bill and other older knowledgeable speakers of the then highly endangered, now even more marginal, language Amurdak, making recordings and compiling a dictionary. That student was Robert Handelsmann. Back in Melbourne, Rob accepted Bill’s invitation, and over the next 8 years [1990-1998] years, Bill and Rob formed a close and productive relationship. Rob produced a brief sketch grammar of Amurdak in the form of an Honours Thesis in 1991, and subsequently worked not only with Bill, but also with fellow Amurdak speakers Nelson Muluriny and Tiger Mangawurlu, recording, transcribing and translating Amurdak in the form of oral narratives and linguistic elicitation sessions, and compiling a draft dictionary.
Today, although a number of people in their fifties and over can still understand Amurdak to a greater or lesser degree, the number of people who possess a substantial competence in the language is down to perhaps three, all of whom are based on Croker Island, and another Robert with a German surname is carrying on work on the language. Based for two brief periods in 2010 and 2011 at Adjamarduku Outstation on Croker, Robert Mailhammer (Assistant Professor in the Faculty of English at Airizona State University) has teamed up with remaining Amurdak speakers Rae Girribug and Charlie Mangulda to build on and extend Handelsmann’s work, using the recordings he made twenty or so years ago as a starting point.
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