Margaret Sharpe to guide language revival on Roper River

February 15, 2008

Thirteen years after her "retirement" from the University of New England, Margaret Sharpe is heading to the Northern Territory to take up a full-time position at Ngukurr on the Roper River.

She will be working as a community linguist for the Katherine Regional Aboriginal Language Centre, helping Aboriginal people revive and relearn six local languages.

Among those languages is Alawa, the subject of a thesis that won Dr Sharpe a PhD degree from the University of Queensland in 1970.

She first visited Ngukurr in 1966, and has returned regularly to the remote community ever since. "I know quite a few people there – people now spanning three generations," she said. "I'm looking forward to living permanently among them, and to having a single focus – a job to be done. When you retire you get involved in so many things . . . ."

And when Dr Sharpe (pictured here) gets involved she really gets involved. Her move from Armidale to the Northern Territory will take her from the University (where, as an Honorary Research Fellow in Linguistics, she has been active in research and has done some online tutoring), local radio station 2ARM-FM (where she has been a presenter of classical music since 1986), the Armidale Symphony Orchestra and Armidale City Band (in which she has played bass trombone since 1983), and the UNE and Northern Tablelands Astronomical Society (of which she has been President for many years).

Dr Sharpe moved with her family from Brisbane to Armidale in 1978 to take up a position as lecturer at the College of Advanced Education, and spent the following 17 years with the CAE and the University. Although she enjoyed teaching in Aboriginal and multicultural studies, it was only after her retirement at 60 that she joined Linguistics – which, she said, was where she "really belonged".

Her keen interest in music – both as a listener and as a performer – began in childhood, when she learnt to play the piano and the flute. She has been able to combine this musical interest with her studies in Aboriginal language and culture, leading a research team in 1994-95 that, funded by a large grant from the Australian Research Council, investigated aspects of Aboriginal song and dance. In her new role at Ngukurr, she said, there might be opportunities to use traditional music as an aid to language learning.

In that role she will be working with the people teaching Aboriginal languages in local schools, and training Aboriginal people to take over the linguistic work. She will also be visiting the schools themselves, where her work is not unknown: a "Learner's Guide to Alawa" that she prepared some time ago for use in the Ngukurr community quickly found its way into schoolrooms.

While acknowledging that the current work in reviving Aboriginal languages "should have been done decades ago", she is enthusiastic about the increasing level of effort in that endeavour. "Things are happening now, and the schools and the people are interested," she said.

Margaret Sharpe will, undoubtedly, keep that interest very much alive in Ngukurr.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at February 15, 2008 01:18 PM