Multilingualism pervades Australia, and not just amongst different migrant groups. Yet languages have been marginal to the study of Australian history.
As a historian of Indonesia, I have needed Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, Balinese and Middle Javanese for my research, but when it comes to examining Australian history, popular and academic writers have rarely gone beyond sources in English. This is despite the existence of written records about Australia, from Dutch, French and other sources pre-dating white settlement, to those which go up to the present day.
The rich archival veins of multilingual Australia are being mined through our project, Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia, funded by the Australian Research Council. The project developed from research and teaching in the collections of the State Library of New South Wales, by colleagues in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. They identified sets of diaries and letters in multiple languages that spoke of combined experiences previously unavailable to researchers.
We seek to rethink and enlarge narratives about Australia that come solely from English-language sources, by showing modern Australia to be a complex multilingual creation.
Searching through the archives
Our core project members from the School of Languages and Cultures — myself, Giorgia Alù, Yixu Lu FAHA, Josh Stenberg, Rebecca Suter, Sonia Wilson, and joined by Sophie Loy-Wilson from the History discipline at the University of Sydney — have been working with materials in German, Italian, French, Indonesian, Chinese, Dutch and a range of other languages. Colleagues commanding Greek, Vietnamese, Arabic, and many more have supported us. Even this capability did not allow us to deal with all the historical sources about Australian history in over seventy languages that we have uncovered in public and private collections. Who would have thought that Australia was a fertile ground for Esperanto?
We quickly found out when we were starting the project that many of the major library and archive catalogues did not identify languages as points of entry. We had to track down thousands of historical sources, searching for sources in languages other than English across categories. Part of the project’s research process involved building a digital tool that allowed us to bring together these sources in a useful research portal. This on-line platform shows connections between sources and allows them to be mapped onto different locations through software developed for other projects, notably the Frontier Massacres project. Through it, academic researchers, teachers at all levels, as well as the general public, can have ready access to these materials.
As an example of the hitherto unknown scale of historical resources, the available library sites, including that essential treasure house, Trove, identified dozens of non-English newspapers published in Australia. Once our lead research assistants, Judith Rozenboom and Siobhan Campbell, had finished tracking the newspapers down, they had identified around 680. Some lasted only a few issues, but Le Courrier Australien is still publishing after 134 years. In some cases, the same publishers were responsible for newspapers in more than one language. In the 1980s, the tenants of North Richmond High Rise Estate got together to publish Our Newspaper in Greek, Vietnamese, Polish, Spanish, Croatian, Chinese, and Turkish, as well as English.
Why multilingual sources matter
Multilingual sources open a door to moving stories such as those of life on the colonial frontier written in French and Chinese. Correspondence and diaries, official and unofficial, in languages such as Norwegian and Dutch connected the early settlement to the immediate region and the rest of the world. Italians, Japanese, Indonesians, Chinese and others interned together in Cowra during World War II left records revealing multiple perspectives on confinement. Some were deeply personal stories of loneliness and hardship, boredom and conflict. Others were stories of espionage and loyalty to foreign countries. Such individual narratives connect to broader ways of telling the stories of Australian history.
Our project has brought to the forefront of Australian history several dominant themes. One of the most notable, stretching from convict times to the present, is of the confinement of people and control of population movements. Following the convict system’s coercive management of transported felons were programs to relocate Indigenous Australians into missions—these were documented in German and other European languages. The White Australia policy may have worked to limit the numbers of people coming in, but once they got here, authorities on state and national level worked hard to direct and delimit people. During World War 2 there were two successive waves of camp settlements that placed “enemy aliens” born in Australia into the same camps as prisoners of war, political prisoners and Jewish refugees. The autograph book in German of children from Tatura camp during the 1940s is one example of such experiences. In the same camp were interned Japanese Australians such as Yasukichi Murakami and those who came on the Dunera refugee ship, such as Jewish Italian Simeoni Mas. War-time camp life set the pattern for organising and directing populations of post-War migrants and later refugees.
The multilingual archive is an archive of alternative Australias. At the same time as anti-communist “groupers” were disabling the left wing of the Labor movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Italian workers’ groups were publishing newspapers challenging the owners of the factories in which they laboured. The 1960s generation of intellectuals from the Sydney Push who moved to England in search of “culture” were unaware of the Russian community groups that met regularly in suburban halls in Sydney and Melbourne for evenings devoted to great literature and classical music.
The stories in multiple languages that make up our collective knowledge of the past reveal a sophisticated and contested Australia. The country is consistently rich for its heritage of many tongues.
