The Guwamu (also spelled Koamu or Kooma) are an Australian Indigenous group whose traditional territory lies in what is now south-west Queensland. According to Wikipedia they are associated with “the Balonne River starting south of St. George, as far as Angledool, Hebel, and Brenda. Their western terrain extended to Bollon and Nebine Creek. Dirranbandi also was part of their territory.”
The Guwamu language belongs to the Maric group of languages which stretches north, east and west throughout most of central Queensland. They share many words in common, such as mari or mardi for ‘person, man’ (hence the name of the group) and gamu ‘water’.
Breen (1990) presents the following map of Maric languages on the Barcoo and Thomson Rivers, north-west of Guwamu territory.
In 1955 the late Stephen A. Wurm collected basic materials on the Guwamu language in Goodooga with speaker Willy Willis. Wurm’s materials consist of a set of fieldnotes written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with German shorthand translations. These notes were hand copied by me in 1976, with English glosses provided by Wurm on tape (see here) added by me to the pages. Copies of these notes were lodged at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra, Australia (reference PMS 4336).
Picture of Stephen Wurm and Helen Wurm in the motorcycle used by Stephen in 1955 to collect Guwamu materials (Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-09/wandering-wurms-and-their-work-to-preserve-indigenous-cultures/102559806)
I have been analysing Wurm’s notes using the Linguist’s Toolbox computer program to create a database of glossed sentences and a Guwamu-English lexicon – this work has been done over many years, whenever I found time during other duties to add to and check the analysis. I have now expanded the lexicon to include Guwamu vocabulary in the comparative wordlist in Lynette Oates’ Grammar of Muruwari, and identified cognates in that language, as well as neighbouring Bidjara, Margany and Gunya. Other sources on Guwamu, such as Ian Sim’s materials or data collected by Gavan Breen, have not yet been added to the basic data set which derives from Wurm’s data from Willy Willis. Here is a sample of what my materials look like:
I have created a draft Guwamu-English dictionary organised alphabetically and by semantic fields, plus an English-Guwamu finderlist. Here is a sample page from the draft Guwamu-English dictionary.
Note: this research has not been published or made available to others, and will remain closed until discussions have been held with relevant Kooma community organisations and individuals. Anyone interested in these materials is invited to write to me via the Contact page.
In 2023-2024 I collaborated with Kooma author and poet Cheryl Leavy on her book Yanga Mother which has text in Guwamu (Kooma) and English. I provided advice on word choice and grammar, to guide Cheryl in her efforts to produce a book that might also be a useful language resource. She notes that “working with a linguist like Peter ensured the grammar was correct. He provided invaluable feedback and support that has been transformative in my own learning journey”.
References
- Breen, Gavan. 1990. Salvage Studies of Western Queensland Aboriginal Languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
- Oates, Lynette Frances. 1988. The Muruwari Language. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
- Sim, Ian. 1959. Comparative Vocabularies of Three Native Languages of North Western N.S.W. and Southern Queensland, 1955. (also Material on Guwamu, Yualayi and Murawari languages recorded at Goodooga). Manuscript, Mitchell Library, NSW.