In 2025 I was invited to collaborate with colleagues at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria Herbarium to work on Indigenous language materials in their collections of 1.56 million specimens of preserved plants, fungi, and algae. About 500 of the collections contain incidental information about Indigenous languages and cultures (e.g. names and use of plants for food, medicine, or artefacts) collected by nearly 90 individuals from across the continent.
The project team for this collaboration includes a botanist (specialising in mycology), a historian, an archivist, an environmental scientist, and a linguist (myself). We have begun by looking initially at three collections, each of which has dozens of plant specimens with their names in local languages:
- Dalton collection from Currawilinghi Station, south-west Queensland. This includes 131 specimens submitted by C. Dalton to the Herbarium between 1865 and 1871. Of these, 45 specimens have Indigenous names associated with them. I identified the language as Yuwaalaraay from my research (1972-now, see Austin, Williams & Wurm 1980, Austin 1993, Austin 2008), and comparison with Gaman Guladha online Gamilaraay, Yuwaalaraay and Yuwaalayaay Dictionary. I gave a talk about this research entitled Planting linguistic legacy materials: some cross-disciplinary possibilities on 17 April 2026 at the Conference on Discussions on Legacy Materials 3 (DiLegMa 3), Institut des études avancées de Paris, Hôtel de Lauzun, Paris. The slides can be downloaded here.
- Mary Kennedy collection from Wonnaminta Station, western New South Wales. This includes 140 Indigenous names, which may be in the Malyangapa language. Detailed work on this material is ongoing.
- Max Koch collection from Mt. Lyndhurst Station, South Australia. I have identified the language in this collection as Diyari, which I have been studying since 1974 (see Austin 2014). One of the plants in Koch’s collection is kuluwa ‘needlewood tree’. This is a “shrub or small tree with rigid, cylindrical, sharply pointed leaves and white, cream-coloured or yellow flowers in late spring and early summer” (Wikipedia) and its scientific name is Hakea leucoptera R.Br. I wrote a blog post about this plant and how it can be used by Dieri people to obtain water. Research on other names in Koch’s collection is ongoing.
References
- Austin, Peter, Corinne Williams & Stephen A. Wurm. 1980. The linguistic situation in north central New South Wales. In Bruce Rigsby & Peter Sutton (eds.) Papers in Australian linguistics No. 13: Contributions of Australian linguistics, 167-180. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
- Austin, Peter K. 1993. A Reference Grammar of Gamilaraay, northern New South Wales. Melbourne: La Trobe University.
- Austin, Peter K. 2008. The Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) Language, northern New South Wales — A Brief History of Research. In William McGregor (ed.) Encountering Aboriginal languages: studies in the history of Australian linguistics, 37-58. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
- Austin, Peter K. 2014. And still they speak Diyari: the life history of an endangered language. Ethnorema 10, 1-17.