I Come from Here (Voices in Australia's Aboriginal and Canada's First Nations Literatures) (Essay‪)‬

"I write from south-west Western Australia." In writing those words I may place myself beyond the horizon of many readers: here at the extreme periphery of down-under. Kaya. I write from the land of the Noongar. I am writing in a language we share, and yet wish to speak of what it has meant to me, as an "Indigenous literary writer," to work with my ancestral language although I have been--perhaps remain--linguistically displaced. I send fragments of trees, paper. Send electronic, digital stuff. Send words. Fractured sentences. At a public gathering, a foreign linguist spoke our old tongue and made the hairs on my neck stand on end, made me bristle in all sorts of ways. I felt angry. How could he utter these sounds, and yet my brothers and my sisters and myself be unable? Disabled. Another occasion: a group of Noongar people trying to resuscitate our language under the guidance of a different linguist. He corrected them, complained of the lazy tongue that our socio-economic version of the English language breeds. I felt responsible. And, again, angry. Some people say it's better not to learn language from such as those, in such circumstances; not from strangers, not from Them. Better that the tapes and word lists, the leaves of paper and imprint of songs were buried with the body that last uttered them. Better that than to learn our tongue from a white man.