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When these two sisters die, a whole language will die with them

Gavin Esler

27 September 2002 - What follows is about wombats. How to catch and cook them, to be more precise. It contains probably every piece of information you will ever want to hear on the subject of hairy-nosed wombats.

They live across vast swathes of the Australian Outback and the man who instructed me how to shoot them is an aborigine called Warren from the Wirrungu people of South Australia.

Where Warren lives is two hours from the nearest small town, miles from anywhere. I have been in Australia for a Radio 4 series, produced in Glasgow, about disappearing languages. There are currently about 6,000 languages around the world and 3,000 are thought to be about to die out within the next 50 years. Wirrungu is one of these. It is spoken by just two people, elderly Aboriginal sisters called Gladys and Doreen Miller. When they die, so does the language.

I had spent much of the day with Gladys and Doreen, talking to them about what the loss of their native language and culture will mean and whether it is inevitable that English will sweep the world. Their extended family decided to invite me for dinner, and we drove even further out into the bush, where they had prepared a fire and a pit.

In the pit were nine kangaroo tails gently baking in the hot embers. While waiting for the kangaroo tails to cook, I started to wander off into the bush, and Warren came after me. I think he feared I might get lost, but I was drawn to huge holes in the red earth, some as big as a metre across.

"Wombats," Warren said. I looked down the holes, but could see nothing. Hairy-nosed wombats are about the size of a spaniel, though they look like giant guinea-pigs. "Very tasty," Warren told me.

I was slowly getting used to what aborigines call "Bush Tucker" - any of the food they can eat from the wild. I had been instructed how to lick the underside of leaves for the sweet casts left behind by a type of fly, but was dreading the prospect of witchetty grubs, a kind of fat maggot that aborigines love.

Warren was explaining to me how they roast wombats in the fire, rather like the kangaroo tails, and he promised to show me how he shot them.

We climbed into his pick-up truck and headed even further into the Outback. He found another clump of wombat holes almost big enough for a small man to climb into. Warren said aborigines nowadays put a mirror into the wombat hole and use it to look around to see where the wombat is sleeping, then they put their shotgun or rifle inside and shoot it.

I noticed he had a rifle on the side of his truck, and for a moment I thought he was going to give me a demonstration. Warren laughed. "We don't shoot them at this time of year," he said. "They are too thin. Not much to eat. All bones. We leave it till they are fat after the rains."

The kangaroo tails turned out to be a real local delicacy. Kangaroos steaks taste like the best venison, and are sold to top-class Australian restaurants, but the tails are not liked by white people and remain mostly an aborigine treat.

Each tail is broken in a couple of places to stop them bending out of the fire. There is a long fatty strip down the back of each one, a lot of bone and a little bit of very gamey meat.

I was handed my tail after one of the women doing the cooking brushed off the ashes with a few twigs. I peeled back the skin and - well, it wasn’t bad. I wouldn't eat it every night, but it was quite tasty.

The only problem was that the fat stuck to my hands as if fused by a chemical bond. I drove two hours out of the Outback towards my hotel, sticking to the steering wheel of my Toyota Landcruiser as if with superglue.

The Wirrungu language will be dead within a few years, and the traditional way of life of the aborigines has already had to adapt to white farmers, sheep in the Outback and the English language.

But even those of us who have no intention of eating kangaroo tails or speaking Wirrungu must recognise that when this way of life goes, all the world will be the poorer.

Lost for Words is on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesdays at 11 am.

Gavin Esler is a presenter on BBC News24.

related links:

• Aboriginal Languages of Australia
  There are more than 200 Australian Indigenous languages, most of which have been destroyed; all the others are endangered. This site has annotated links to 140 resources for nearly 40 of these languages. About 30% of these resources are produced by Indigenous people.
• Language and Culture: A Matter of Survial

Further information: language issues page - includes news index and external links

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