Student Achievement: An Interview with Tula Wynyard

Tula is a second-year PhD candidate at the School of Languages and Linguistics. She is working on documenting Ritharrŋu-Wägilak, an Indigenous language spoken in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, under the supervision of Prof Rachel Nordlinger and A/Prof Brett Baker. She is the 2023 recipient of the John Mulvaney Fellowship.

Valeria spoke with Tula about her PhD project, her fieldwork in Arnhem Land and her personal connection to her research.

Valeria Morelli

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Hi Tula, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Congratulations on the John Mulvaney Fellowship! Can you tell us more about it?

It’s from the Australian Academy of Humanities. John Mulvaney was a pioneer in the humanities in Australia, particularly in his advocacy for the protection of Indigenous cultural heritage, so it’s a real honour to be awarded this fellowship. The fellowship includes some extra funding for fieldwork, which I’m doing up in Arnhem Land. This is fantastic because field work in Northern Australia is extremely expensive. In particular, the speakers I work with are not necessarily on their own Country: a lot of the Ritharrŋu and Wägilak people I work with are based in Ngukurr, but their Country is actually up further north, so there are speakers split between Ngukurr, Gapuwiyak and Numbulwar. They’re quite large distances apart, so it’s important to get to all those places, meet people and make sure I’m working with everyone who wants to work with me.

What is your PhD project about?

My PhD project is about documenting Ritharrŋu-Wägilak. It’s an Indigenous language that is spoken by two moieties, two social groups, Ritharrŋu people and Wägilak, and they’re in what’s called a “yothu-yindi” relationship. It’s like a mother and child relationship, so the language is shared and there’s a sense of shared responsibility and reciprocity between those two groups. There was a brief grammar written by Jeffrey Heath in 1980 that outlines some of the main features of the language and the grammatical sense, but there’s been very little done since. There are some points of analysis, recordings and community language work that have been done, which is excellent, but, in terms of academic documentation, there are some areas missing there that I think are really important to document. The main thing I’m going to be looking at is how complex sentences or complex grammatical constructions appear in Ritharrŋu-Wägilak.

How many people speak this language?

I’ve worked with about 15 people so far, but there are a few more people that I haven’t worked with or haven’t been able to contact yet. But it’s not particularly widely spoken and a lot of the speakers speak other languages as well.

Do you speak the language?

I’m learning. It’s quite different from English and from other languages I know or I’m familiar with. Transcribing definitely helps with learning it. Particularly the two elder men that I work with the most are very good at correcting me when I say things wrong. It does help a lot, and just trying to speak in language whenever I can or get those key phrases, like “what does this mean?” or “can you say it slowly?”, is really helpful.

I imagine it has a completely different structure from English.

Very different. In Australian languages we talk about Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages, which are two big categories of languages in Australia. Pama-Nyungan, which this language is one of, is what’s called dependent-marking. Basically, you’re encoding grammatical relations not on the verb. For example, you see case markers on nouns to show what is the subject, what is the object etc. Ritharrŋu-Wägilak is part of this language family, but it’s showing some differences that potentially reflect contact with non-Pama-Nyungan language families that have very different structures, usually called head-marking, meaning that the grammatical information tends to be marked on the verb. So, it’s interesting that we’re seeing possibly some development due to that contact between language groups.

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Can you tell us more about your fieldwork?

I did about two and a half months of fieldwork from the end of April this year. I went to Ngukurr and Numbulwar, but I am hoping to get up to Gapuwiyak soon and maybe do one to two more field trips during the course of the PhD. I didn’t manage to do a lot of transcription with the speakers I was working with, I did less than I would have hoped to do, but I got a lot of time recording with people, which was fantastic. So, I would like to focus on transcribing more next time I go.

In April I was mainly working with the Ngukurr Language Centre and they’ve been super supportive, which is brilliant. Most days I’d go in and work with the Ritharrŋu-Wägilak people who come in. The language centre is pretty busy because they’ve got seven different language groups that they’re supporting, all with varying levels of documentation and speakers with different levels of fluency. The Ngukurr Language Centre does amazing work facilitating documentation and teaching, so they’re getting that community-led language revitalisation underway. Ritharrŋu-Wägilak is one of those languages where you’ve got a few elder speakers, but the written documentation is less than comprehensive. Being able to work with Ritharrŋu-Wägilak people, who do still speak their language, is a valuable opportunity to do that documentation.

What’s the documentation process like?

A lot of the time we’re making recordings together, so I’ll record conversations or asking people to teach me the language and me doing a terrible job of learning, repeating the wrong thing over and over. We also use things like picture prompts, word lists, storybooks, so asking the speakers I’m working with to tell a story based on the images, which has been really fun. We also do a lot of cultural activities, like talking about stories from the old days, bark burning for paintings, going out to get bush medicine, a lot of fishing. It’s good fun, I really enjoy it.

Can you tell us more about living with the community?

Obviously, the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia has been fraught and very traumatic. Hopefully we’re able to bring those skills together that come from academia and community language work, but it’s not always an easy relationship. The key thing I guess is working with people the right way and making sure that your expectations for each other are clear. So, I think living or staying with the community for a significant period of time is really good for building those relationships, because that’s going to be really important to both of you feeling like you’re working well together. It’s always going to be somewhat conflicting when you go from a very rigid university structure with certain deadlines to working with speakers who have other priorities, family connections, places to go and jobs to work. So, trying to negotiate those in a way that’s fair and productive for everyone is really important. It’s also vital to understand the social and cultural context the language is spoken in and understand those connections better.

What do you enjoy most about your project?

I think what I like most about my project is that there’s a bit of variety: from being in the language documentation lab and reading papers, getting ideas about what’s happening in the language, to being in remote community, working with people on a day to day level, thinking about the types of recordings that we want to make, as well as getting out on Country. You’re trying to do both those things and bring them together in a way that’s cohesive. I think it’s the most rewarding and challenging at the same time: that kind of balance of academic and non-academic is so valuable.

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How did you get to your research?

My family background is Dharug (Burramadagal) from Sydney. It’s an Indigenous group in the Sydney area. Our language was documented in written form but wasn’t ever recorded as audio because Dharug was one of the groups that was really hit hard by colonisation in Sydney early on. We do have some documentation of word lists and sentences, but it’s a big gap not having those recordings. So, looking at the revitalisation of that language and the challenges that came up in trying to look at more complex grammatical or phonological structures pushed me into what I wanted to do for this PhD project. In terms of how I ended up working with speakers of Ritharrŋu-Wägilak, my supervisor, Brett Baker, has worked for a long time with speakers of Wubuy in Numbulwar, as well as Ngandi and Ngalakgan in Ngukurr, and he knew of people there that were speaking Ritharrŋu-Wägilak and who were keen to do some documentation with a linguist. So, that was his suggestion and that’s what I’ve ended up doing.

It’s fascinating that you have such a personal connection to the topic.

I think it’s something you’re studying for an academic angle, but there’s also the question of “what do people’s grandchildren want to hear?”. So, the richer documentation you have, the easier it is to get teaching material out of it and to safeguard important cultural stories. Whatever the use is in the future, there’s hopefully something in the data that’s been recorded and documented that can lend itself to being used or taught. Ideally the speakers are passing the language on and there’s teaching, but you want to be able to hear people’s voices even after they pass away or to hear those stories and have them recorded for the future. When those languages are not spoken anymore, there’s some cultural knowledge that is not passed on, the special ties between Country, culture and language that’s really important.

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Any advice for potential PhD students who are considering working on Indigenous languages?

Relationships are so important. If there’s not trust and respect there, it’s not going to work out. Mob agreeing to work with you means that you have a responsibility to honour those relationships and work together the right way.

Also, every project is going to be different, and every fieldwork environment and group of speakers is going to be different. It requires a lot of flexibility, and you need to be able to think about what’s going to benefit the community, but also what’s going to be academically relevant, and how it’s possible to bring those things together. And know that things will change and that you might need to change topic or location or approach and that’s fine. When you’re working with a community of language speakers, it’s a living diverse group of humans and there’s got to be this appreciation that things will change. Don’t get too set on any one path, be accommodating and embrace change.

That’s great advice for any PhD candidate. Do you have any future projects?

Ideally, I’d like to continue working with the same language community. I’m not sure what form that will take yet; it could be working with the school or working with the language centre or language organisations, something along those lines. I’m also interested in academic career pathways. If there’s a chance to do both, I would love to do that.

Thank you, Tula, for speaking with me and all the best with your project!

Thank you, Valeria.