Overview

Peter Sutton has been at various times, and sometimes simultaneously, a museum-based anthropologist with a foundational role in raising the profile of Australian Indigenous art, an anthropologist and linguist who has made significant ethnographic, analytical and theoretical contributions to both fields, and to the intersection between them, an expert on native title, and a public intellectual. The contributors to More than Mere Words reflect on Sutton's important contribution to linguistics and the study of Australian languages. The first two chapters give a historical perspective on the study of Australia's Indigenous languages. There follows a section on language as a reflection of connection to place, and then a set of essays on language in its socio-cultural contexts, spanning prehistory to the present. The final part of the book charts the consequences of the colonial encounter through a consideration of language endangerment. The volume's title captures both the complexity of languages as systems embedded in their social contexts through space and time, and a sense that this celebration of Peter's life and career cannot simply be read as 'mere words'. Edited by Paul Monaghan and Michael Walsh Contributors: Louise Ashmore, Paul Black, Barry Blake, Luise Hercus, Clair Hill, Harold Koch, Patrick McConvell, Paul Monaghan, David Moore, David Nash, Alan Rumsey, Jane Simpson, Clara Stockigt, Jean-Christophe Verstraete, Michael Walsh

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9781743057551

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Paul Monaghan is the Manager of the Mobile Language Team at the University of Adelaide, a ten-year project that seeks to document, revive and maintain the 44 languages of South Australia. Michael Walsh has conducted fieldwork since 1972 in the Top End of the Northern Territory, mainly in the Darwin-Daly region. Since 1979 his work has been a mixture of academic endeavours and consultancies, mainly relating to Aboriginal land issues. From 1999 he has participated in the revitalisation of Aboriginal languages in New South Wales. From 1982 until 2005 he was part of the teaching staff of the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney. From 2004 to 2010 he participated in a large Australian Research Council-funded research project involving a team of linguists and musicologists. Currently he is part of an NH&MRC grant investigating the reclamation of the Barngarla language (west of Adelaide) and the effects of this on health, particularly mental health.

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